Yea, contrary to what they say it's not a copyleft license at all. It's a source-available "we accept volunteer contributions but expect to give nothing back." Oh well, guess I'll keep using VLC.
Yea, contrary to what they say it's not a copyleft license at all. It's a source-available "we accept volunteer contributions but expect to give nothing back."
Yeah, it's really weird, it means you can contribute but not fork, which would discourage me from contributing as it guarantees the community and contributers are never really in charge....
Yeah, it's really weird, it means you can contribute but not fork, which would discourage me from contributing as it guarantees the community and contributers are never really in charge.
Restrictions
No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.
Official Distribution: Only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications.
A friend pointed out this is actually against github's terms of service: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content Edit: ah and there's...
Does Github actually care about this? I've seen a lot of repositories with "Source Available" licenses and I can't recall a single one being taken down because of the rules.
Does Github actually care about this? I've seen a lot of repositories with "Source Available" licenses and I can't recall a single one being taken down because of the rules.
I once (many years ago) reported a repository to them for being outright binary-only, with no source provided at all. They declined to do anything about it, and explicitly told me they were cool...
I once (many years ago) reported a repository to them for being outright binary-only, with no source provided at all. They declined to do anything about it, and explicitly told me they were cool with that.
Wow, people are opening up hundreds of issues to tell them over this. I think that a lot of people have fond memories of Winamp and would love to contribute, so this license choice backfired...
Wow, people are opening up hundreds of issues to tell them over this. I think that a lot of people have fond memories of Winamp and would love to contribute, so this license choice backfired immensely.
Tangentially, I miss the Winamp days of having really fun, good visualizers and I haven’t really been able to find any that aren’t trash. Now that it’s easy to cast to a TV, it’s a shame spotify...
Tangentially, I miss the Winamp days of having really fun, good visualizers and I haven’t really been able to find any that aren’t trash. Now that it’s easy to cast to a TV, it’s a shame spotify et al don’t have a solid visualizer to add to it.
The developer of G-Force is still maintaining and updating the code, supposedly looking into 3D modeling. I think it’s still the best visualizer on the market despite looking quite similar to how...
The developer of G-Force is still maintaining and updating the code, supposedly looking into 3D modeling. I think it’s still the best visualizer on the market despite looking quite similar to how it was 15+ years ago.
The same developer also makes WhiteCap, which is a little more closer to a spectrum analyzer that looks cool.
It is a shame that visualizers haven’t seem to have gotten much love in recent years, especially since the hardware we have now has only gotten better.
Same for screensavers. All the visualizers and screensavers that used to be popular could run on modern integrated GPUs (let alone dedicated ones) while barely even rousing them from their idle...
It is a shame that visualizers haven’t seem to have gotten much love in recent years, especially since the hardware we have now has only gotten better.
Same for screensavers. All the visualizers and screensavers that used to be popular could run on modern integrated GPUs (let alone dedicated ones) while barely even rousing them from their idle states.
On a similar note, Electric Sheep is one of the coolest screensavers from back in the day (and still is!). The Gold version allows HD resolution (though this predates 4K). Since the screensavers...
Same for screensavers.
On a similar note, Electric Sheep is one of the coolest screensavers from back in the day (and still is!). The Gold version allows HD resolution (though this predates 4K).
Since the screensavers are actually generated on people’s home machines, it has the effect of continually making new designs throughout the years. This predates GenAI and blockchain, and uses a fraction of the compute power, and yet here I am feeling like a Luddite wondering if it was a better use of resources than modern tech is proving to be.
I loved Electric Sheep. Artistically it was such a cool concept. However, I was pretty bummed to realize that the animations were more or less hand-made and just farmed out to people running the...
I loved Electric Sheep. Artistically it was such a cool concept. However, I was pretty bummed to realize that the animations were more or less hand-made and just farmed out to people running the screensaver to render it into MPEGs that the screensaver would stitch together.
I wonder how much of that could be done on-the-fly today with modern GPUs and some sort of AI model to generate keyframes to animate between.
The Music app on macOS still a couple of visualizers from the iTunes days built in and I think still supports third party visualizer plugins, if one can find them on the web. Unfortunately it...
The Music app on macOS still a couple of visualizers from the iTunes days built in and I think still supports third party visualizer plugins, if one can find them on the web. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like the newly rebuilt native Apple Music app for Windows has that feature, though… for that one needs to install iTunes for Windows, which I think is now unsupported.
Hah; it looks like they have some GPL violations in there too. Doesn't seem like anything egregious -- just a typical lacklustre approach to library dependencies typical of that era -- but it's...
Hah; it looks like they have some GPL violations in there too. Doesn't seem like anything egregious -- just a typical lacklustre approach to library dependencies typical of that era -- but it's still very amusing to have it come out this way.
Hopefully this only serves to encourage them to release their code under a proper open source license, and doesn't dissuade other software developers from opening up source code for their abandoned projects.
I suppose copyleft is a bit of an umbrella term but at least colloquially I've never seen it used how they're using it with the large amount of restrictions placed on it
I suppose copyleft is a bit of an umbrella term but at least colloquially I've never seen it used how they're using it with the large amount of restrictions placed on it
The associated git repository is here. The license is a bit strange for an obsolete media player, though.
Yea, contrary to what they say it's not a copyleft license at all. It's a source-available "we accept volunteer contributions but expect to give nothing back."
Oh well, guess I'll keep using VLC.
Yeah, it's really weird, it means you can contribute but not fork, which would discourage me from contributing as it guarantees the community and contributers are never really in charge.
A friend pointed out this is actually against github's terms of service:
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content
Edit: ah and there's already an issue open on it:
https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/issues/6
Does Github actually care about this? I've seen a lot of repositories with "Source Available" licenses and I can't recall a single one being taken down because of the rules.
I once (many years ago) reported a repository to them for being outright binary-only, with no source provided at all. They declined to do anything about it, and explicitly told me they were cool with that.
It'd be nice if they weren't anymore, though.
Wow, people are opening up hundreds of issues to tell them over this. I think that a lot of people have fond memories of Winamp and would love to contribute, so this license choice backfired immensely.
Yeah.. I think I'll continue to just use my ancient winamp skins with audacious.
Tangentially, I miss the Winamp days of having really fun, good visualizers and I haven’t really been able to find any that aren’t trash. Now that it’s easy to cast to a TV, it’s a shame spotify et al don’t have a solid visualizer to add to it.
The developer of G-Force is still maintaining and updating the code, supposedly looking into 3D modeling. I think it’s still the best visualizer on the market despite looking quite similar to how it was 15+ years ago.
The same developer also makes WhiteCap, which is a little more closer to a spectrum analyzer that looks cool.
It is a shame that visualizers haven’t seem to have gotten much love in recent years, especially since the hardware we have now has only gotten better.
Same for screensavers. All the visualizers and screensavers that used to be popular could run on modern integrated GPUs (let alone dedicated ones) while barely even rousing them from their idle states.
On a similar note, Electric Sheep is one of the coolest screensavers from back in the day (and still is!). The Gold version allows HD resolution (though this predates 4K).
Since the screensavers are actually generated on people’s home machines, it has the effect of continually making new designs throughout the years. This predates GenAI and blockchain, and uses a fraction of the compute power, and yet here I am feeling like a Luddite wondering if it was a better use of resources than modern tech is proving to be.
I loved Electric Sheep. Artistically it was such a cool concept. However, I was pretty bummed to realize that the animations were more or less hand-made and just farmed out to people running the screensaver to render it into MPEGs that the screensaver would stitch together.
I wonder how much of that could be done on-the-fly today with modern GPUs and some sort of AI model to generate keyframes to animate between.
Nice on the link and yeah just dropped out of the scene. Probably because things don’t have community friendly features like mods anymore.
The Music app on macOS still a couple of visualizers from the iTunes days built in and I think still supports third party visualizer plugins, if one can find them on the web. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like the newly rebuilt native Apple Music app for Windows has that feature, though… for that one needs to install iTunes for Windows, which I think is now unsupported.
Hah; it looks like they have some GPL violations in there too. Doesn't seem like anything egregious -- just a typical lacklustre approach to library dependencies typical of that era -- but it's still very amusing to have it come out this way.
Hopefully this only serves to encourage them to release their code under a proper open source license, and doesn't dissuade other software developers from opening up source code for their abandoned projects.
The comments on that github issue are purest gold
I suppose copyleft is a bit of an umbrella term but at least colloquially I've never seen it used how they're using it with the large amount of restrictions placed on it