Yesterday, the beloved legacy media player application Winamp released its source code on GitHub. Winamp isn't as popular in today's era of apps that stream music with licensing built in (a la Spotify and Apple Music), but back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was by far the most popular third-party media player on PC. That should make this a momentous occasion— however, as many members of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community have quickly pointed out, its highly restrictive license prevents a lot of what we'd usually expect from releases like this. So, while Winamp is on GitHub and this is a source code release, it's not like the application has gone "full" open source or anything.
Typically, source code releases correspond to new branches of a given piece of software, often ones that test improvements that may or may not return to the original. However, the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1 dictates that there will be "No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form." Unfortunately, this means we won't see any enhanced or "classic" versions of Winamp anytime soon, at least not from this release.
