or licensed in a way that makes them uninteresting to most free software developers (like Helix)
I used to work as an open-source developer with the helix engine (still do, in fact), and didn't find the licensing to be that much of a turn-off. It's kinda like the NPL, or the GPL with the special rights for the Licensor outlined in section 3.
You can read the Helix license mentioned in the article here:
RPSL
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The UI is written in glade, and the helix engine is wrapped in a GtkWidget-based GObject.
This makes it easy to create your own UI or even custom player
UI feedback is welcome on the users mailing list, users@player.helixcommunity.org, which you can subscribe to on https://player.helixcommunity.org.
The referenced "direct download" link is for the nightly builds of the helix player. The release MS2 build can be downloaded from here
(You must register on helixcommunity.org and click through the binary eula to get access to it)
The main page for the player project is at: https://player.helixcommunity.org/
From there, you can access the web forums, mailing lists, and issue tracker.
I used to work as an open-source developer with the helix engine (still do, in fact), and didn't find the licensing to be that much of a turn-off. It's kinda like the NPL, or the GPL with the special rights for the Licensor outlined in section 3.
You can read the Helix license mentioned in the article here: RPSL