Llama Group has recently made headlines by publishing the source code of the popular multimedia player Winamp. The code, written in C++, uses dependencies such as Qt, libvpx, libmpg123, Opensl, and DirectX 9 SDK. It’s important to note that the desktop application assembly is exclusively maintained for the Windows platform, requiring the Visual Studio 2019 compiler and Intel IPP 6.1.1.1.035 libraries. Unfortunately, options for MacOS, Android, and iOS remain closed for Winamp.
Despite previous intentions of transitioning the project to an open development model, the code has been released under a proprietary license called WCL (Winamp Collaborative License). This license imposes restrictions that bind developers to the main project, requiring any changes, improvements, or corrections to be transferred only to the official repository. Personal use changes are allowed, but the creation of forks and distribution of modified versions of Winamp are prohibited.
Furthermore, Winamp distribution is restricted to official channels only. The main repository is hosted on GitHub, but the development process on this platform, involving the creation of forks and transferring changes through Pull requests, technically violates the ban on forks and changes being shared with others.
Originally created in 1997 by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev, Winamp has remained one of the most enduring multimedia players with active development. Initially designed for Windows, Winamp boasts approximately 83 million users and gained popularity for its customizable interface through skins. This led to the development of open clones for Linux such as xmms, xmms2, beep media Player, audacious, and qmmp. Last year, facing financial difficulties, Llama Group, which acquired Winamp from AOL in 2014, had to disband the main team of developers for the classic Winamp application and shift focus to developing a streaming web service and mobile applications.
