It's a little bit sad to me that Winamp collapsed just a year or two before smart phones really took off because it's interface and customizability were pretty well suited to the app format of smart phones. And now that the code and design are owned by a company that's being run by greedy morons there is likely never going to be anything resembling the original available for the phone app market.
I just use VLC on my phone these days. It works, no bullshit ads, and no glitches.
Edit: oops. It had its final release in 2007. Shows how much I use Linux for multimedia lately! Around 2000 this was my go-to. I had it hooked up to an Inspiron laptop in my car with a usb game controller to switch tracks and stuff.
But the main app is tightly integrated into the win32 api--moving it to linux would basically require a complete rewrite. DEADBEEF is an example of something like this. Parallel values and ideals, but open source.
There are wine-bottled versions out there. Of course, whether or not output is bit perfect would depend on the wine settings. Bottling it, of course, defeats the point of the program being highly modular/extensible.
Also, you have to remember that a lot of proprietary formats have proprietary encoders/decoders that are incompatible with the GPL.
Shipping Windows binaries are much less of a hassle for the dev than than trying to reverse-engineer everything they need or figuring out how to manage dependencies with different licenses across different package managers and distros with different goals.
tl;dl foobar2000 is an excellent sum of its parts; like Winamp was back-in-the-day. You start changing parts and you get a different sum.
For those that don't know, they are going to release something called FreeLlama which might be FOSS (no public info as to what the license actually will be).
Winamp says that they still want to control 'what features' go into winamp and it'll remain proprietary. I assume they really just want people to contribute interesting things to FreeLlama and then put the contribution into Winamp.
The license probably won't be FOSS because they probably aren't going to want anyone contributing to own copyright to the code that they are committing.
It is odd because FOSS contributors aren't really known for being OK with this sort of thing in the past, so I doubt they're going to get much out of it. Maybe it's a Hail Mary and they'll end up blaming people for not freely giving up their devtime and creativity to a company that wants to make money on it.