Nobody said anything about open source

Title is "Winamp Legacy player source code is now open". The usage of the word "open" in conjunction "source code" alludes to the long established "open source code" phrase, which implies a set of licenses, and the associated open source culture.

A better choice for the title would have been "Winamp Legacy player source code is now available".

I agree but my statement still holds true. When something doesn't explicitly say "Open Source", it's not Open Source. This is a very old trick that i've learned decades ago..

Well, the description in the Repo says this:

>its source code was opened to the community

I find it hard to believe that any serious person would argue that "code that is open to the community" ≠ "open source code".

I think it's realistic to assume that the developers who wrote the README, and the lawyers who wrote the license didn't talk to each other much when making decisions about how much freedom users were going to have with the code.

They've worded it just as they intended imho (ignoring the confusion over fork aspect) as it's how to ensure that they're still in charge & to prevent anything derivative as they really don't like that based on prior experience with them.

It's also mostly about getting that lovely free dev work because with oh so many capable devs out there they're just going to be clamouring to want to give up anything where possible to be able to work on this along with trying to appear to be doing good. Even though they've halted development at least 3 times I'm aware off & ditched a number of dev teams under their 11yr tenure of ownership.

I share the same feelings, and I think that the way they phrased it is intentional. They are clearly capitalizing on the goodwill that is built around open source software over the years. In a "having the cake, and eating it too" kind of way.

Their official blog post does

https://winamp.com/press/winamp-open-source-code

It does not. It open-source only in it's URL which has no semantic value if you read the article.

And the license itself states,

> The [license] is a free, copyleft license

And then proceeds to not be a free, copyleft license.

This pretty clearly seems like they're trying to squat on the terms "copyleft" "free software" and "open source" while weasel-wording their way out of it — "open washing", as someone else in the comments called it, seems to fit. This smacks of someone who wants to use the words, and to have you feel like they've used the words, but without having to actually do the things the words would mean, spoken genuinely.

Contract law doesn't really allow for this kind of behavior. If you say over and over again that your software is open source and the community is free to develop with it as they please, and then write your license to say the opposite, you're going to have a hard time enforcing the license given that you're actively telling people to violate the terms in your press release.

It's still misleading and they're obviously trying to imply marketing value that doesn't exist.

Yea this is just a case of a bad HN title. The source is clearly not open, even if though it is released.

EDIT: looks like the title’s been corrected!

They say the same thing in their blog post announcing it.

https://winamp.com/press/winamp-open-source-code

The HN headline did

If I can read the code, it's open source.

What you're complaining about is free source code, which this probably is not.