This 27-year-old “Windows” media player software is going open source. Here's why

If you're a child of the 90s, you've probably heard of the Winamp Media Player, which became popular in the 2000s and offered multiple codec support, tons of customization options, stackable design, and so on. Although the media player is still available, the world has moved to streaming music platforms and the relevance is becoming less day by day. And now, 27 years later, the company behind Winamp has announced that it is going open source.

Winamp is going open sourceWinamp has officially announced that it is now going open source and that the entire source code of the media players will be available to everyone from September 24th. This means that users and developers have the opportunity to download the code and integrate or optimize it in the way they want and create something new, something different from it depending on their needs.

Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp, mentioned in the official announcement: “This is a decision that will delight millions of users around the world.” Our focus will be on new mobile players and other platforms. We will be releasing a new mobile player in early July. However, we don't want to forget the tens of millions of users who will use the software on Windows and benefit from the experience and creativity of thousands of developers. Winamp remains the owner of the software and decides on the innovations in the official version.”

That's good news, but why now? While Winamp usage may have waned over the years due to online streaming platforms, this move will still excite some users and developers. But the main question is: why now?

Well, there is no clear answer to that. However, with the competition getting tougher day by day, this seems like a logical step and no one knows what people will use the good old Winamp source code for and what new features and integrations they will add to make it more functional and revolutionary.