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Hacking AOL From The Inside
gizmo_mathboy writes: "It looks like the people that brought you Gnutella and Winamp, Nullsoft, are having fun hacking AOL code after AOL absorbed them. The story is here." One old idea this illustrates is that large, merger-ridden companies like AOL are hard to categorize simply -- they simply have too many parts, not all of which will ever be in complete concert. This kind of semi-allowed internal hacking could be the most valuable thing at AOL right now, though.
I thought it was highly interesting when AOL bought Nullsoft. I equated it to their purchase of Netscape... even though some people might have a problem with that analogy, I'd say that the amount of people using Winamp at the time was probably about equal to the number of people using Netscape. (Market share aside... although Sonique wasn't as popular and there were no other decent MP3 players for Windows at the time)
Netscape withered and died, though. A lot of good talent left the company. But with Nullsoft, the whole team went over... and they're still there.
Now, it's only a matter of "When's Justin Frankel gonna get fired?" Don't get me wrong, he's a genius and a hero in a lot of respects (Shawn Fanning doesn't hold a candle to him, IMO) but he has a knack for doing things to piss off the big corporations... including those that are in the same company as his now. This is a GOOD thing... generally, the stuff that he has made has went pretty far (Winamp, Shoutcast, Gnutella... that's one hell of a resume) but one day someone in another branch of that giant media conglomerate is going to overreact and demand Justin's termination.
It's not as if that would matter, though. So far, anything of his that AOL has shot down made it into the public domain, anyway. He's smart enough to know how to get things out there too, under the radar of AOL until it's too late.
Nullsoft is proof that good things can come out of corporate America, that large corporations don't always go for the loot at the expense of innovation. I'm not saying that AOL actively supports Nullsoft, but their general hands-off approach is almost surprising, considering since they own the company, they can just send a few managers in there to look over everyone's shoulder and make sure that they're not writing the Next Big Thing in Copyright Violations...
Oh sure, Rome had its orgies, slavery, egomaniacal emperors, and gladiatorial games but they also had one of the most vibrant and advanced civilizations of their day and paved the way for modern Western society.
What exactly is bad about having an advanced civilization and paving the way for modern Western society?
"It was an odd admission considering that the Winamp player doesn't distinguish between playing legal and illegal MP3s either."
Funny, neither does my walkman.