Jun 3 2003

Rogue AOL Subsidiary Leader to Resign

  • Written by Jorge
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SAN JOSE, Calif. – 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. (news.yahoo.com)

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.”


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 (news – web sites) before it was axed by AOL. But the genie had been set free, and other developers refined the code to create post-Napster (news – web sites) 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.


Read more

Related Posts

  1. VIA Releases Source Code for Program based on WASTE
  2. AOL Snuffs Nullsoft’s
  3. Nullsoft Encrypts Communication with WASTE
  4. A Talk With the WASTE Project Manager
  5. WASTE 1.4.2
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