Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp

Found on NetaNews on Wednesday, 10 November 2004
Browse Software

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

However, growing displeasure reached a boiling point with Nullsoft’s unsanctioned release of WASTE -- an encrypted file-sharing network -- in June 2003. Frankel threatened to resign after AOL removed WASTE, but remained with the company long enough to finish Winamp 5.0.

But without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.

It's a shame when a big company hinders the inventions and ideas of its workers. Instead of supporting P2P by helping Gnutella/Waste in court to show that P2P is not the pure evil as the industry wants it to be seen, they just fight against employees. That way, they doom products which are great. Perhaps WinAMP will be reborn under another name.