The “staff picks” comment

I worked at Winamp till this February. I was the one that suggested the we’d open-source all the player code that belonged to us (so stripping all the Dolby, Intel IPP, etc stuff that wasn’t owned by Winamp), so that the community was free to do whatever it wanted with it. I envisioned something à la DOOM GPL release. Amongst ourselves we joked about seeing enthusiasts create a Winamp-for-your-smart-fridge or Linux port. That would have been pretty cool.

Instead that proposal was repeatedly ignored by management which couldn’t be convinced that this decades-old spaghetti code had nothing more than historical value. “Why would we give our IP away ?! We paid for that”. As if VLC, Foobar2000, etc didn’t exist …

As a last resort, I played the PR angle : After our NFT adventures (barf), the Winamp “brand” took a hit with enthusiasts, so maybe releasing the code would give us some positive attention for once? That got us from a solid NO to a MAYBE … Months passed and nothing happened. The 4 legacy player dev’s got fired before we could clean-up the code for publication. I left soon after.

I was surprised when they announced the code release. Somehow minds had changed ? I was even more surprised when they followed through with the code’s publication. Sadly, as the world has now witnessed, the release is a shitshow. (Indicative of the company lol)

No one audited the code, no legal review, the licence is probably AI-generated … No one took the time to do this right. I’m so dissapointed :(

Also “the Brussels-based Llama Group SA, with roughly 100 employees”. I don’t know why I keep seeing that. Llama sold TargetSpot to Azerion, and then fired half the remaining staff. The whole group is down to mayyyybe 30-something people. There was so much free-space in our offices that we could have hosted the olympics :p

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/winamp-really-whips-open-source-coders-into-frenzy-with-its-source-release/?comments-page=1#comments