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Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

I was a huge fan of Winamp back in the day, but the way they handled the software completely soured me towards it. Winamp 3 was a clusterfuck, Winamp 5 was fine but felt like bloat, and then it was passed around like a hot potato, then abandoned on and off, and then the open sourcing feels like it was also around for quite some time. And now it's not even that, just a meager source-available. I know they don't owe me anything, but I feel disappointed.

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You have to place some of the blame for latter Winamp versions on AOL who purchased Winamp from Frankel's team and messed with it so much he eventually resigned.

I think selling it wasn't mandatory, and the consequences of selling are predictable, so some of the blame rest with the original decision-makers as well. But I find hard to care after so many years, if I have to be honest, they just messed with my darling too much, and I have long moved on.

It was either sell it & shoutcast or kill both off since aol in 2013 was changing & there's lots of other projects under them at that time which were killed off instead of what was thought to be a better option to keep it going elsewhere.

Alas going to radionony which has ended up becoming llama group after some funny business stuff going on was a mistake though some of the other options that I was aware of at the time weren't great either.

And I'm not defending aol either as there were things that I didn't like under their almost 15yr tenure of ownership but it was never condescending like this lot have been over the past 11yrs which their licensing terms have reinforced.

One of the earlier examples of enshittification, before the process had been smoothed out and best practices established.

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