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.
