Justin Frankel quits AOL
Winamp’s inventor Justin Frankel has quit AOL, reports CNET, confirming rumours that have been floating around since last week.
“Eighty percent of the people at AOL are clueless,” Frankel is quoted as saying in David Kushner’s Rolling Stone story here.
That might partly explain why “Frankel said the time was right to step down after shepherding the latest version of the player, Winamp 5, to a public launch in late December,” as the report says here.
In 1999 Frankel, then 20, sold his Nullsoft company to AOL for a reported $100 million but in the years that followed, “clashed frequently with his corporate handlers, stirring up controversy with a string of products that fell outside AOL’s approved regime,” says CNET.
One such as WASTE.
But before that came Gnutella.
“Gnutella’s birth came at the end of what Frankel now calls his ‘very short honeymoon’ with America Online,” says Kushner’s excellent article.
“At first, it seemed like the ultimate setup: good money, a nice office and the freedom to work on the next version of Winamp. But it didn’t take long for things to sour. Almost immediately after the deal was struck, persnickety hackers online cried ’sellout.’ Frankel’s girlfriend broke up with him because, he says, ’she got freaked out by the money.’ And the big, open office Nullsoft and Spinner shared in San Francisco got Dilbertized by AOL. ‘Three months after we arrived,’ Frankel says, ‘they built all these cubicles, and it sucked.’
“It was inside his cubicle one day that Frankel first saw Napster. File-trading wasn’t new. But Shawn Fanning, Napster’s nineteen-year-old creator, had coded a clever piece of software that made this geekish pastime user-friendly. ‘When I first saw Napster, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool,’ Frankel says, ‘but how will they keep from getting sued?’
“Napster had a fatal flaw. Fanning was using a bank of his company’s own computers to facilitate all those Metallica songs flying back and forth online, and Fanning was setting himself up to profit from copyright infringement. ‘Napster was a company built on people doing things that are illegal,’ Frankel says. ‘That’s wrong.’ Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft’s team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster.
” ‘Frankel decided to “take the wind out of Napster’s sails.’ His solution: an online network that could let people trade all kinds of files – songs, videos, whatever – in a decentralized environment. By connecting people’s computers directly with one another, they could trade data without having to go through some company’s rack of servers. Best of all, Frankel thought, such technology would be good karma, too. ‘I would not be getting any money from it,’ he says. ‘I’d be giving power to people, and what can be wrong with that?’
“Frankel got to work on what became Gnutella, named after the chocolate-hazelnut spread and, more tellingly, the ‘GNU’ free-software project. He coded fast and on the sly. ‘I didn’t want AOL to find out,’ he says, ‘because they’d prevent it from happening.’
“On March 14th, 2000, Frankel and Tom Pepper, a Nullsoft cohort, uploaded an early version of Gnutella, with a note: ‘Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and Shoutcast. See? AOL can bring you good things!’ The next day, Frankel was with his parents touring Alcatraz, appropriately enough, when his cell phone rang. It was Pepper. ‘Dude,’ Pepper said, ‘you better get back to the office.’
“By the time Frankel returned, he says, ‘the shit had hit the fan.’ The timing of Gnutella couldn’t have been worse from the company’s point of view. AOL was in the midst of trying to merge with Time Warner, which was involved in suing Napster for facilitating copyright infringement.
“AOL ordered him to take the program down immediately, and the company put out a statement calling Gnutella an ‘unauthorized freelance project.’ But Gnutella, unlike Napster, couldn’t be stopped. More than 10,000 people had downloaded the beta software that first day, and intrepid hackers had gone to work to reverse-engineer it and throw it into the hands of the open-source community, laying the foundation for BearShare, Morpheus, LimeWire and other file-trading wares.”
The rest is, as they say, history.
