SirEDCaLot

Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

The author of the GPL'd code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

However if it's a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.

Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.

Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.

Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.

Complicating that however, is the fact that if it's a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of 'authors' and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.

There's an old quote, 'never blame on malice that which can be explained by incompetence'.

I would adapt that to be, 'never blame on homosexuality that which can be explained by stupidity'...

Should have invited her to go watch the eclipse together

Here's the story:
Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That's it.

The 'Winamp source license' was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.

There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn't actually own the rights to.

This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.

Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can't be legally used or distributed.

Today I learned. Thanks for that!

~~There's currently no way to delete an uploaded image.~~

~~That's especially problematic since pasting any image into a reply box auto-uploads it. So if your finger slips and you upload something sensitive, or if you want to take down something you uploaded previously, there's no way to do it.~~

~~What should happen is whenever you upload an image, the image and delete key get stored in some special part of your Lemmy account. Then from the Lemmy account management page you can see all your uploaded images and delete them individually or in bulk.~~

So it seems you can now do this- Profile, Uploads shows you all your uploads. Go Lemmy!

No it's actually pretty simple. No containers. Your passkeys can be managed in the browser (Google Passwords), by a plug-in like BitWarden, or in a third party hardware device like YubiKey.

And, with respect, this view is more naive (IMHO) because it's focused by size of company, and you can't do that. You can't have one set of laws for small companies and another set of laws for large companies.

So if Google has to pay to link to IA, then so does DuckDuckGo and any other small upstart search engine that might want to make a 'wayback machine this site!' button.

Google unquestionably gets value from the sites they link to. But if that value must be paid, then every other search engine has to pay it also, including little ones like DDG. That basically kills search engines as a concept, because they simply can't work on that model.

Thus I think your view is more naive, because you're just trying to stick it to Google rather than considering the full range of effects your policy would have.

Strong disagree. If I make a website people like, and Google links to it, should Google have to pay me? If so, Google basically can't exist. The record keeping of tracking every single little website that they owe money to or have to negotiate deals with would be untenable. And what happens if a large tech journal like CNET or ZDNet Links to the website of a company they are writing an article about? Do they have to pay for that? Is the payment assumed by publicity? Is it different if they link to a deep page versus the front page?

What you are talking opens up a gigantic can of worms that there is no easy solution to, if there is any solution at all.

I will absolutely give you that what Google is doing is shitty. If Google is basically outsourcing their cache to IA, they should be paying IA for the additional traffic and server load. But I think that 'should' falls in line with being a good internet citizen treating a non-profit fairly, not part of any actual requirement.