Justin Fankel was the original creator of Winamp which became the world's most popular software MP3 player in the late 90's. In 1999 the Nullsoft founder sold its company to AOL in a deal worth $ 100 million. With AOL on Justin's side, Justin clashed with AOL frequently by violating various AOL's conditions. Justin loved working with his friends on Winamp, but hated dealing with the AOL's regime or its way of running its American business. Nullsoft developed some cutting-edge software for AOL including streaming media applications such as Ultravox and media players.
On the other hand, Frankel made a major clash with AOL in 2000 when it released a beta server-less Peer-to-peer application Gnutella. At the same time, AOL was in the midst of acquiring the major record company Time Warner and as we all know, Napster at the time was the music industry's worst enemy. All though Gnutella's main download source was removed, Gnutella had been vastly distributed which gave away to software engineers creating other breeds of server-less peer-to-peer applications which took the place of Napster after it had been shut down.
In 2003 Justin began working on another private peer-to-peer tool called Waste where users could create and join in on private peer-to-peer networks that cannot be accessed by the public without the network owner's membership. Justin was then forced to discontinue the project by AOL. At that time, he threatened to quit AOL, but decided to first accomplish the big goal of bringing Winamp 5 to a final build. Once Winamp 5 went out for release Justin resigned from AOL. This comes just weeks after AOL laid off hundreds of programmers in its West Cost offices as well as at least two from Nullsoft division where Frankel worked in San
Francisco.
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In an interview over instant messenger with CNET News.com on Monday, 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. The announcement brings to a close a chapter in the annals of dot-com history, which began in 1999 when the then-20-year-old Nullsoft founder sold his company to AOL in a deal reportedly worth 0 million. In the years that followed, Frankel clashed frequently with his corporate handlers, stirring up controversy with a string of products that fell outside AOL's approved regime. Read the full story here. |
It was very nice of Justin to put a lot of work into building what became the world's most popular MP3 playback software. At the time when Winamp was first released, almost all MP3 playback software required registration and either functioned at a limited period trial or played only a small portion of a song. While Winamp was Shareware at the time, there were no restricted features or expiration period in the unregistered version. Winamp became freeware around the time of the take-over by AOL and remained so throughout Winamp 2 and the unsuccessful Winamp 3.
Currently Winamp 5 looks to have all the features of Winamp 2 as well as some useful features of Winamp 3. It took me a little time to get use to customising Winamp 5's media library, but after doing so I find it a very useful feature that was missing in the official versions of Winamp 2.
Source: CNET Technology News
