The creator of the Winamp MP3 player, Justin Frankel, is sick of battling
the corporate suits at AOL Time Warner, the world's largest media and
entertainment company, so he is calling it quits.  You can read all of
Justin's thoughts on digital media on his web log at:

http://www.1014.org/

Kelly





    June 3, 2003

    Rogue AOL Subsidiary Leader to Resign

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

    Filed at 2:58 p.m. ET

    SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- A young programmer whose software startup,
Nullsoft, was gobbled up by America Online -- and then caused numerous
headaches for its corporate parent -- plans to resign after his latest
piece of rebel code was pulled from the Internet.

    Justin Frankel, 24, announced his intentions late Monday, less than
a week after a file-sharing program called Waste was posted and then
pulled from the Nullsoft Web site.

    ``The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I
have,'' he said in his Web log. ``This is unacceptable to me as an
individual, therefore I must leav (sic). I don't know when it will be,
but I'm not going to last much longer.''

    Attempts to reach Frankel by telephone were not successful. An AOL
spokeswoman declined to comment.

    AOL paid $86 million for Nullsoft in 1999. At the time, the San
Francisco company was best known for creating a popular music player
called Winamp.

    Despite the new corporate ownership, Nullsoft's team of programmers
managed to maintain a freestyle hacker culture.

    In March 2000, Nullsoft briefly posted a decentralized file-sharing
program called Gnutella before it was axed by AOL. But the genie had
been set free, and other developers refined the code to create
post-Napster file-sharing programs.

    Nullsoft's latest creation was a file-sharing program that allowed
users to set up secure networks of no more than 50 people.

    Within hours of its posting, Waste was deleted. In its place was a
notice that said the program had been posted without Nullsoft's
permission.

    ``If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the software,
you acquired no lawful rights to the software and must destroy any and
all copies of the software, including by deleting it from your
computer,'' the statement said. ``Any license that you may believe you
acquired with the software is void, revoked and terminated.''

    Frankel, who is called ``Our Benevolent Dictator'' on the Nullsoft
site, founded the company in 1998 after dropping out of the University
of Utah.

    ------


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