---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:28 PM Subject: Fwd: The Pirate Who Wasn't: Inventor of P2P Gnutella Network To: [email protected] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 9:30 AM Subject: The Pirate Who Wasn't: Inventor of P2P Gnutella Network To: [email protected] *The Pirate Who Wasn't* from: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_... As the author of *Gnutella*, Justin Frankel was Fanning's rightful successor. Unlike Fanning, he got his payday early in the game. In 1999, after WinAmp hit it big, AOL bought both it and Frankel's company, Nullsoft, for something in the neighborhood of $100 million. That made Frankel a very rich 20-year-old. It also made him an AOL employee. It wasn't a great match. With Nullsoft, Frankel's modus operandi had been to write the best software he could, then give it away for nothing. At AOL the business of selling software threatened to overwhelm the software itself. "The products that I worked on, it was very much like, We want to make *this * money out of this. We're doing this deal with *these* other companies, and so the product is going to do *this* as a result," he remembers. "No one cared about how users actually experienced it." Meanwhile, Frankel was writing Gnutella in his spare time. It was a brilliant hack: unlike Napster, it was genuinely distributed, with no central server and therefore no off button for the lawyers to push. He posted it online in March 2000 with a note: "See? AOL can bring you good things!" But reinventing Napster did not endear Frankel to AOL, a huge Internet company that was trying to merge with a major media company, Time Warner, that was in the middle of suing Napster. He left AOL in 2004. Then he did something funny: instead of glorying in the success of his creations, he walked away. He doesn't use Gnutella, and he never made a dime off it, even though 10 years later, LimeWire — the most popular Gnutella client — still claims 50 million users. "When I wrote it, it was primarily as a sort of, This is proof of what is possible. Let's not all go profit from it," he says. "So it made sense to not even have anything to do with it. It was more of a concept." Frankel, who recently moved from San Francisco to New York City, now works full time at his company, Cockos (don't ask), which is focused on an audio-production suite called Reaper. He constantly improves it, and he stays in close touch with his customers, who number in the tens of thousands rather than the millions.* "There's no goal of growing a certain amount or having an exit strategy," he says. "It's just about enjoying the process and doing the right thing." *He would certainly never describe himself as the world's most dangerous geek, as *Rolling Stone* did in 2004. "I don't see piracy as really being that dangerous," he says. "Ultimately, people who have business models that depend on strong controls for everything — those are flawed models. And I say that as a software developer, where there's a certain level of piracy." Gnutella is ancient history to him. "Digital piracy: Has it destroyed the music industry? No. Has the music industry had to adapt? Sure, and many would say for the better. You have people focusing more on quality, smaller bands, things like that." "As far as the big business of hits and pop music, did that suffer?" he continues. He shrugs and laughs. "I hope so." *Links* jTella, Gnutella for Java: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtella/ FrostWire, Gnutella + Bittorrent App: http://www.frostwire.com/ gtk-gnutella, Gnutella for C++: http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/ *See Also* http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/open-letter-to-anonymous-lulz... ╭━━╮━━╮━━╮━━╮┏┓┄┏╮ ┃╭╮┃╭╮┃╭╮┃╭╮┃┃┃┄┃┃ ┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃╰━╯┃ ┃┗┛┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┃┗━━┓┃ ┃┄┄┃┃┃┃╰╯┃┃┃┃╭━━╯┃ ┗┛┗┛┛╰╰━━╯╯┗┛┗━━━╯ #ANONYMOUS #TwitterArt ✔❤☼ http://idibidiart.com -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens