The Winamp Collaborative License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. It is designed to ensure that you have the freedom to use, Modify, and study the software, but with certain restrictions on the distribution of modifications to maintain the integrity and collaboration of the project.

Oh god....

No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form. No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software. Official Distribution: Only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications.

Copy left is not a protected term but yeah this is a shit license.

And how the fuck do you contribute code back without forking the project?!

EDIT: It looks like an issue has already been created and I absolutely love this thread where the license they are using is in violation of Github TOS.

They should have just kept the source closed! The speculation is that whomever purchased it wants to crowdsource contributions without adding any value themselves.

[–] RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

People on Hacker News are speculating that they implicitly define forking as "taking the project in a different direction in an independent repo". The Github TOS say that everyone has the right to create a fork of any public repo in the Github sense of the word. It's all a huge mess...

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 months ago

It's one of the reasons why I hate license proliferation. These custom licenses aren't tested against case law so if they think you're in violation you have to defend yourself.

The only way to give these assholes a run for their money is for people to start forking the project and ignoring any terms that are in violation of the GitHub TOS.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 3 points 2 months ago

This was predicted back when they first announced it... what do you know, it was correct.