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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Interesting as a historic document. If someone is willing to port it to newer systems or compilers, also maybe of some value. I really don't see much value considering there are already reasonable good, lightweight (I think) and multi-platform (like qmmp) which offer support to winamp skins.

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It's the same as the Opera Presto leak a few years ago. You cannot legally maintain or update, let alone distribute it. Back then you could find a few minor patches in Russian forums but that's about it. So even if there's people capable and willing to maintain it (which for a browser I think is an order of magnitude more work), there is no easy way to have a collaboration platform that also gives the project enough visibility, so motivation is pretty low.

Is this legal obstacle true everywhere? If a company stops making a breakfast cereal permanently, then I can replicate it and sell my own. Why not a browser that Opera is never going to sell again?

Copyright law will generally cannot be applied to a breakfast cereal anywhere. Patents or trademarks may apply, however, but these work differently.

Is it the same everywhere? No, but it is similar in a lot of places, due to political agreements and convergence.

There's still plenty of that "true hacker" mentality (for lack of better term) in lesser-known and mostly non-English sites out there. Chinese is common, as is Russian, not surprisingly. I dare not disclose them because I know they'll get too much and unwanted attention, but look hard enough and you will find.

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