[P2P-F] Fwd: The Pirate Who Wasn't: Inventor of P2P Gnutella Network

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:28 PM
Subject: Fwd: The Pirate Who Wasn't: Inventor of P2P Gnutella Network
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com




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From:
Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 9:30 AM
Subject: The Pirate Who Wasn't: Inventor of P2P Gnutella Network
To: global-survival at googlegroups.com


*The Pirate Who Wasn't*
from:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html

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-lulzsec-and-anti-censorship-activists/

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