Slashdot Mirror
Justin Frankel On AOL, Subverting The Status Quo
linuxbaby writes "Rolling Stone has an excellent feature on Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp, Gnutella, Shoutcast, Waste, and other projects. The article calls him 'the world's most dangerous geek', and after years of being muzzled by AOL for igniting the pirate nation, Frankel is breaking his silence." The article ends by asking: "In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control?"
my hat is off to this guy, especially for waste. that program rox..
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Thank you.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
It would be enough for me for the Internet to become a place where I can search and find any goddamn thing I'm looking for, whether it be the latest software update from Microsoft or an old album by Boy George or NAMBLA chatrooms.
Perhaps I've said too much...
I have been pwned because my
"Eighty percent of the people at AOL are clueless," he says. Was this supposed to read: "Eighty percent of the people using AOL are clueless?"
...
i heard that aol sucks? should i believe htem or should i use it? iw ant the internuet
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Rock on, Atarians...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
That note the article ends on . . . what makes anybody think the internet is either of those extremes? The thing about the internet is it makes distribution of information and goods relatively easy for anybody with a computer. That includes pirates and corporations. The interesting thing about the internet is that it seems to level the playing field for both (although corporations still have one distinct advantage; advertising).
I am surprised Rolling Stone would cover this. Rolling Stone has evolved into a tool for corporate control.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
simoniker is actually one of the best editors. if there is a mistake in an article summary, he corrects it quickly. he doesn't add his own editorial content to the article summary because, unlike pretty much every other editor, he actually posts in the comments section. he dirties himself up and actually associates with us commoners. the other editors sit on high and rule, simoniker runs games as a reasonable human being who respects other peoples opinions might.
The corporation 1) Can afford better lawyers 2) Can afford better lobbyists 3) Can afford better advertising
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Well, I must certainly say that Mr. Frankel has contributed a worthy amount of applications and ideas to the collective community.
I guess I'm just finding it rather humorous, and maybe a sign of fads/things to come where a programmer is in rolling stone.
In the end, the software is more important than the creator. See Gnutella/Frankel, Napster/Fanning, or Mosaic/Andreesen. I applaud RS for trying to put a human face to the music revolution, but let's face it, that piece came across as more of a bad history lesson. What's next, an edgy piece on Marconi?
Frankel just might be one of the more revolutionary people we have nowadays. He seems to give people not only the ability to be productive and listen to music with a decent player, but stick it to the various corporations that'd rather have us all doing the same things and eating the same food.
Here's to Frankel!
It looks like he'll be getting out of AOL soon and going back to what he does best. It's an exciting time, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
He did, and got in a lot of trouble for it. He then quit/was fired/god knows what really happened from AOL. Then AOL said they owned the code and it wasn't REALLY GPL'd. There was a huge article on this "slashdot" site about it. Ringing any bells?
"Sour grapes."
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
You're thinking of WASTE. The grandparent poster was talking about WinAMP.
The Internet subverts and/or disperses power. This frightens corporations, governments, and megamedia because it allows individual people to be who they want to be and it gives them a voice to express that. Worse, it lets them filter the corps and gubmit critters out. Radio and TV? Best you can do is flip the ads. I got almost all of 'em blocked on my browser no matter where I go.
On the Internet, name brand means nothing. Anything you can think of to force your trashy product down my throat, I can think of a way to step around or destroy it. Any way you can think of to try and control my behavior, I can think of a way to step around or destroy it.
Megamedia like CNN, MSNBC, etc. don't want you to get information from the Internet. On the Internet, information can be dissemented from trusted sources directly to the people who need or want to hear it. I remember talking to a guy in Kuwait during the war who was telling us about how things were. Media doesn't like that. They want to tell you how things are as they see it.
Corporates are screwed on the Internet. They can exert some level of control over the Web with advertising and laws, but, frankly, when it comes right down to it, what fucks them most is that people are free to get the information they want and control its flow from start to finish. If I want to proxy out corporate garbage, so be it. If I want to disseminate something you don't want me to disseminate, too bad (Diebold, anyone).
Subversion at its finest. I welcome it with open arms. It's about time people were given the opportunity to really think and act for themselves.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
What the hell is happening to Winamp? Used to be that you could get a version of their good old 2.x series from this site (the latest 2.x were lean, but still do video!)
The latest version I have is 2.91 with md5sum:
68f0f87b12306939e7e3c7549db5df5f winamp291_full.exe
Is there anything newer? Why can't I find these on their web site? There's version 5 now available. What is this... slackware?! (version jump)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
huh?
if you really want to be free, use BSD and Apache license.
You wouldnt sell out for 100 million dollars ??
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I agree with you completely.
Not long ago, I noticed that an article had dissapeared and was reposted later. Simoniker was kind enough to reply, and explain that it had accidently been live for a few minutes in the morning, and then was pulled and posted later in te day.
He was paid in AOL stock, not dollars. What are 400 million pieces of toilet paper worth?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
It's always amusing to read about times when AOL, by itself, had a "future."
I'll probably remember this article every time I see an advertisement for "AOL For Broadband." They spend $100 million on a spirit too free to be a company man, and they spend even more developing an OVERLAY to high-speed internet connections.
Earthlink gives you that crap for free. :)
Chicks dig my good /. karma.
This questions is so cliche that they actually made a ccg out of it
I think he's being serious!
How about using the search function yourself? It's not too hard.
*shrug*
I still remember my first MP3 and the first time I used winamp. My jaw dropped to the ground. THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING!!! I thought. This was back before Napster. Back when we had to get mp3s from ftp sites and we had to scroll long ass lists of directories to find the song we wanted. There were no p2p applications with fancy search engines. Anyone here remember Blex's page of good mp3?
When I heard aol bought nullsoft I was a little disappointed because I thought Frankel was a sellout and winamp would become bloated and lame. Frankel stayed cool as hell and winamp didn't become lame. Gnutella was the first decentralised file sharing/search network and it scared the shit out of corporations like aol. And he released it after he supposedly sold out. It was opensource. So Justin is still cool in my book. Who cares if he's rich? Shawn Fanning might be a moviestar now (Italian Job) but Frankel is the real revolutionary hacker.
I often got asked who my hero was, and I never had an answer.
This man is one of my heroes.
He is pushing what America once was about, shedding the bonds of control on people. The original constitution and Bill of Rights were about removing the bonds government put on people, giving people the freedoms they deserved.
However, the government stopped being the threat: corporations took that over.
Justin Frankel is a new patriot, fighting in the true spirit of America, and battling against the corporations who are trying to dominate humanity. It has happened in the past. Monarchies ruled men. They were broken. Corporations replaced them. Now, they need to be broken.
We need more people fighting for human empowerment.
FWIW, I was eating dinner (orange glazed chicken and some egg rolls) during the period of time this 'quick slap' was alleged. But thank you for caring :)
I give him full credit for building/putting together some of the best programs, but he can't be that dangerous if he doesn't innovate.
1.) winamp... please there are a ton of dos based binaries that play mp3s first.
2.) gnutella... napster first.
etc etc
No, he gathered a bunch of cool people around him and made a kick ass product that no one else at the time could touch then sold out to corporate america for a very large sum of money. Then he went on to work on subverting corporate controll while being paid by same embodiment of corporate america. Justin was NEVER a corporate drone and when they tried to make him conform he quit.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Simoniker is my favourite editor. Who would think differently?
From the article it seemed that this guy didn't really do a whole lot for AOL. Sure they got winamp out of the deal but the article implies that he sat around all day and wrote code just to piss them off. AOL didn't want the "run with the little guy" image but yet they must have extracted at least some work out of him. Either way I have to wonder if his PHB has any hair left at all.
Rolling stone appears to be slashdotted, here's a mirror from the author's web site:
The World's Most Dangerous Geekhttp://www.blorp.com/music/Full%20Jams/031115-bren nankushner.mp3
www.dhorrocks2003.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/waste 3 million plus (2.7million unique) downloads of waste from here so far, just goes to show how good justin is...
P
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
There are some pretty angry ex-AOL subscribers.
This post was meant to be Informative, not Funny.
Secured Party, Without Prejudice, UCC 1-207: Creditor
someone could figure out a way to rid the industry of all the assinine idiot programmers, I would be much happier. Not that I'm an elete programmer or something, but the longer I work in this industry, the more idiot programmers i come across. At this point, my biased opinion is the top programmers who have the ability to dream up a program and build it well constitute 5%. 50% of all programmers I've met do the minimum to not get fired or are totally useless because they don't work well others or ignore good advice. Oh well.
The only sour thing about it is that he signed that deal with AOHell.
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
Thanks for responding. I actually agree that you're one of the best editors here.
I'm actually a rather poor troll.
"Many scientists of the day believed that wireless waves travelled only in straight lines from the transmitter and hence range was restricted to line-of-sight. Marconi proved, however, that the curvature of the earth was not an obstacle for wireless telegraphy over great distances." ~ Marconi's Atlantic Leap
In St. John's, Newfoundland in 1901 Guglielmo Marconi's kite received the letter "s", as transmitted in Morse Code from Cornwall, England.
AT&T, Verizon and AOL received $0.00.
The End
Stuff that matters.
Government can(and often does) deprive its citizens of life,liberty and property.Hell thats what Communist government was all about.
Corporations do not have these powers well except on a small scale but only when they are empowered by....Government.I can never understand why so many,particularly on the Left,hate and fear "Evil Corporations" while generally celebrating(if not worshipping) Government.
"Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster."
NARQ!
Am I the only person that thinks these two items might be connected?
Actually, it sounds like he is the sort of person who would not need to cheat.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's pretty cool... when it's up, that is. Seems like every weekend lately it's been shut down for cleaning...
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
The Internet is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status. Justin Frankel is no more important than someone who contributes 2 lines of code to Apache.
/. terms, just because everyone knows who Bush is, doesn't mean he runs the country. But not everyone is as influential as him, either.
The point is not that he's a celebrity (because he's really not), but that he's influential. Like Leibniz, or Fourier, or any of those other brutally important innovators that most haven't heard of.
But yes, "there's no end to the good you can do if you don't care who gets credit." Celebrity certainly doesn't equal importance, but neither is there no such thing as degrees of influence/importance on the internet.
To put it in
Don't begrudge him credit because your jealous. No one's asking you to worship him. Just appreciate that he's innovative, and that's important.
Because the government is currently placing no restrictions on corporations. We attempt to fight the battle on both fronts: give power to ourselves and remove it from corporations.
While we already have some restrictions on the government (they've been slipping lately) we've got jack on the corps.
Hence, the reason to fight.
Also, there is no way for society to function without a government. If you can find a way, do tell. I do not see it, not in the world we live in. Corporations are a slightly different matter, so we can fight them all out (fighting governments must be reformation, fighting corporations can be eradication)
Frankel was one of the first to create something real from his ideas (Gnutella, Waste, WinAmp), but these were Windows programs. We should also be thanking or acknowledging the people that added to/reverse engineered those programs so people on all platforms could use them (mldonkey, XMMS, and etc.)
Winamp's a good thing. Gnutella was even better. I think that was his best project yet. The part of this state of affairs that I believe makes the RIAA so upset is that they do not control the technology, and given recent rulings, containing the technology will prove difficult as well.
In fact, if anything, by decentralizing the technology, Frankel has helped the RIAA spend copious amounts of money on legal fees chasing individuals (I doubt the lawyers are working pro-bono. I also doubt that the entirety of their payments will come from settlements/legal winnings) instead of facing down corporations like Napster
The article isn't too bad for a buff-puff piece
Frankel, Carmack, Jobs, Gates. What do they all have in common? They all bet big on PC technology, and changed everyone's life in ways we take for granted today. One additional attribute: They all made a lot of money.
Of course there are a number of other people who have made huge contributions: Berners-Lee and Torvalds for example, but neither made big dollars from their ideas.
In other words, people like Frankel not only innovated, but they were paid quite well for their efforts. Now that's impressive. It demonstrates that others were/are willing to pay for the things they created, which is a pretty good way to determine if you have created something of value.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
You ever take a look at the NSIS installer by Nullsoft? Some of the example code has like "I'm a sheep fucker" in it and other miscellaneous naughty language.
;) It's pretty funny considering that AOL is "family oriented" or whatever the hell they claim to be.
Not to mention his antics, like releasing WASTE and getting AOL's panties all twisted up (by the way.. what WAS the point of that tool??
Ah well... I hope he puts his mind to good use and develops a truly anonymous P2P protocol on AOL's dollar. That'd be a very nice thing...
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I usually skip the author of articles (the way I skip ad banners at the tops of sites), but after seeing how much he interacted with Frankel during the interview (even picking up an electric guitar and jamming with him a bit!), I went back to the top and was surprised to see it was written by David Kushner, the same man who wrote Masters of Doom.
>>In the near future, he says, he's going to have
>>a sit-down with his boss and enthusiastically
>>return to a riskier way of life. This could
Where is he working now, has he actually left AOL? I see a lot of comments that he is gone, but last I heard he was still there and his words were:
I don't know when it will be, but I'm not going to last much longer.
he uploaded Winamp (the name is short for Windows Amplifier
Actually, it's short for the Windows port of amp (An MP3 Player) for *nix.
Just how different is real life censorship from the internet. Sure, you have access to arbitrary garbage, most of the time. When was the last time you read slashdot at -1?
We censor ourselves, generally to those publications that agree with our own views. When was the last time you read research pages at Micro$oft? In the end, the only difference between the internet and traditional media is that the brands online are not as firmly established as in the 'real world'. Given enough time, this space will be just as commericalized (read censored) as every other media. Not because some big corporation has done it, but becuase every big website has become big by pandering to its audiences prejedices and misconceptions.
Don't agree with me? Take a close look at what websites you visit on a regular basis. Convince yourself you visit a new webiste with a view different from yours every day....
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
this was interesting when the issue came out 3 weeks ago...
Complete bull!
If you wrote a program and released it under the GPL, at any time you can turn around and say that you are going to release it under a more restrictive license.
The key here, is that the released version will still be available, and anybody can improve upon it. However, that is certainly NOT unique to the GPL... Release a program under the BSD license and you have the same effect, but even less chance that it can get shut-down (with the GPL, if a patent shows-up, you can't distribute the program any longer, the BSD license has no such restriction).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yeah, and you can get info from trusted sources on HAM radio too, there is nothing unique to the Internet here. Plus, how many of the millions of people on the Net could/would chat with somebody from Kuwait to get "trusted" information? Now how many of the millions on the Net would instead go to CNN.com or MSNBC.com, or Google News to get information about whatever. Just because it's possible to do something with the Net doesn't mean that anybody (== statistically significant number of poeple) does it.
The people who are "subverting corporations by using the internet" are really just people downloading music for free. That's not about people wanting to subvert anything, it's about people being greedy and wanting to get something of value for free. Nobody is using P2P to get information about Iraq.
One of the best things about the Internet is that no one owns it. It is a shared resource. Not many true shared resources these days. And like with all shared resources, it asks that the people who share it be responsible with it.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Reminds me of the license plate on one of Linus' cars: coffee, chocolate, men: some things are better rich.
It may not an order of magnitude less than the other guys; but I think they're still doing OK.
gay translation:
orange glazed chicken = sweaty nutsack
egg rolls = large black cock
hope this helps!
You're talking nonsense. At any moment, the copyright holder of a GPL licensed program can turn around and say "Okay, I'm closing the source, any further releases will now be under this new license." The authors can't prevent people from distirbuting/modifying the code that is already available, but they can continue their own closed source development and make releases under any terms they wish.
If you hold copyright on a work, then you always have total control over it, and I don't know of any way you could give up that control even if you wanted to, except for assigning the copyright to someone else (in theory, there's "Public Domain," but that's hard to achieve in reality).
They can only exist as corporations because of legal recognition by Government.
The State has been the perpetrator of mass murder,enviormental destruction , stifling of human potential.. just a short list of their crimes.
And what have corporations done that is so evil in comparison to the State?
"Society" existed long before the invention of the State(a relatively short era in the long history of humanity) and it functioned just fine w/o it.We are still here aren't we?
Wasn't it Shawn Fanning who did that?
This guy has been my hero since winamp 2. Of course, i lost faith after the winamp 3 debacle, but anyhow. I think that this guy could have slashdown groupies if he wanted ;)
Tragek
justin needs to come back to #mpeg3 efnet :(
Gosh now the algorithmic part of the design is the most important, instead of finding the best tricks to make the machine do what you want ... the horror.
The best will always be the best, removing the hurdle of tricking the machine will just make them more productive.
it was seth green. what are you thinking?
is here: http://pron.blorp.com/sym/
(this is the same link in the paper version)
Yeah, like Rolling Stone magazine can really communicate any relation to subversion of dominant culture. This guy is far from a true subversive. Call me when he starts talking about "hypertelia" and he means it.
I imagine a lot more of us would fight hardcore for our principles and be more revolutionary if it didn't mean we might have to end up on the streets because we become unemployable.
It's interesting to hear slashdot discuss these matters, but I'm a little taken aback by the choice of wording.
Referring back to the text of the original post: "subvert corporate control." I'd like to point out that there's a difference between subverting and circumventing.
First, "subvert" has a slightly
"Circumvent corporate control"... now that's got a nice ring to it. I suspect that's a better word for filesharing. The term acknowledges that there's a corporate domain, but also allows for reality, which is that there's also a domain of independents. That is, i believe, a healthier way of thinking about it.
And, by the way, i think the term "piracy" might be a bit harsh, don't you think? Consider the fact that many downloaders are merely getting an mp3 format of something they already own, or owned, on phonograph, eight track, cd, tape, record, vcr-tape, dvd, etc. I think it would be a mistake to conflate downloading with piracy. To do so puts the "front line" further back than it has to be.
I think the best way to present filesharing in a positive light would be to present it as a form of public library. Ahh. The public library. One of the best bastions of public decency remaining in America. And people love them. And the analogy is so nice.
Somebody once told me the best things in life are free. So if you insist on calling the free things in life piracy, where's that going to get you? Checking out a library book, or tape, or movie, isn't piracy. And it's free.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
but it appears that being 'stuck' with a 16bit ti 99/4a (tms9900 precursor to the tms320 series dsps) was the reason. Oh why didn't we get the atari?...er wait, that was an atari 2600 I asked for....
i am so very tired....
Seriously look at the above statement,now think about it. Can anyone tell me exactly how corporations pose even 1% the threat that Government does?
I too had an Atari, actually a couple of them. Old tricked out 400, which I still have because of how it looks, and an 800XL which died :(
Poking around that machine taught wonders. Display lists and their interrupts, graphics modes and memory mapping for scrolling and such, the sound chip. Lots of fun hardware ready to play with.
The Atari did lots of interesting things, once you decided to hack around a bit. Joystick ports were bi-directional and latched if you wanted. Great for controlling things.
Most hardware has the really good bits hidden from the programmer. Today this is really true, given the API we almost all work through. (Not that this is a bad thing, it just is.) Back in the day, the Atari was unique in its design. The smarter you were, the more you could make the machine do --true for the game machine as well.
Many years later, people are still finding new ways to get those bits of hardware to do new and interesting things. No wonder people still hack the old machines. It is worth doing.
To me, this is what really appeals about OSS. The hardware hacks are not as common or necessary --to me at least. Hacking your OS to work a specific way is as good as using display list interrupts, creative display memory mapping and complementary colors displayed on alternate scan lines to double your horizontal screen resolution. (Yes, you can get an Atari to display 640x192, though it is a slow beast while doing it. Heck, if you had a broken TV that could display the entire NTSC signal, the Atari was capable of using almost the entire overscan if you wanted.)
Anyway, I only purchased a few pieces of software. MAC/65 -- Best damn assembler/editor/debugger ever for 8bit machines, Star Raiders, and Archon along with a few other disk games. Did the same thing others did. Wrote lots of interesting programs, learning at the same time.
(One nostalgic Atarian thinking about seeing if the old beast still boots!)
Blogging because I can...
"Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster."
We have a word for that in the joint: rat-fink.
Another word we use is "shanked".
Justin himself seems a little schizo over the issue. On the one hand, Napster using their servers to promote file sharing is "wrong". On the other, Gnutella is "right". Make up your mind, Justin.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I remember Blex's page of good mp3!
Je me souviens du site web de Blex des bons mp3s!
However, the government stopped being the threat: corporations took that over.
Again,when did Government stop being the threat and how do corporations compare?
The answer is "A". And the tense is wrong -- it already has become.
Funny, though, even to hear this question from Rolling Stone, which hasn't been about subverting corporate control for at least 20 years now.
How did this get modded Informative?
The article calls him 'the world's most dangerous geek'
Did someone forget about Jon Johansen??
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Can you imagine getting 100 million and then being forced to move into a Cube?
I was wondering if there was some rider that bound him to AOL for a certain period of time, or if he pulled out of his own volition he would loose some of the money. There must be some binding force or I couldn't see why he would not have quit long ago. Perhaps he still thinks he can leverage AOL's resources to the good...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wait a minute, wait a minute...he ran the school's network and accrued a GPA of higher than 4.0? And you don't see ANY POSSIBLE CONNECTION? Oh, he didn't use the keylogger to spy, suuuuuuuure... :-P
Sneaky student or not, though, this man is a saint.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
The FSF makes a big point of encouraging software authors to transfer the copyright to the FSF, though. For practical reasons from the point of view of the software, i.e. it then has an organization behind enforcing the GPL, whereas it's a layer removed from said organization if the copyright remains with the author. If said copyright transfer occurs, no, the author does not have control any longer.
---
In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control?
I swear my JonKatz filter should have caught this.
Simoniker,
Thanks for the simple reply. Too often, we don't have enough, if any, positive interaction with slashdot editors. Little comments like yours can go a long way in helping things out.
Sex is one of the more useful small windows apps.
Oh, and there seems to be an encrypted version out as now (safesex).
Oddly enough Lindy and George found this sort of hero worship repulsive as well and were both famous for doing all they could to avoid it.
They were remarkable men.
To deny this is egalitarian bullshit. I've known a small number of remarkable men, some who are household names, some whom you will never hear of. They are apart from normal run of humanity. By a good deal.
Now, when I read in this story that Frankel was responsible for the online music phenomena my bullshit meter pegged so hard the needle broke. He wrote a few programs. They're nice enough programs I guess. I tried WinAmp once. It was ok. I prefered, and continue to prefer, others.
I have no idea whether Frankel is a remarkable man or not. He's young yet, only time will tell. He could just be l'enfant terrible.
But the article left me with the impression that this was a man I'd like to meet, not from any sense of hero worship, just because he seems an interesting man.
So I'd say the article had some legitimate purpose, even if it was a bit of journalistic hype. Maybe they just need to balance it with an article on an interesting man who has contributed two lines of code to the Apache Project.
KFG
Thanks to the efforts of Justin Frankel, and Yannick Heneault the Karaoke bar I work at on the weekends was able to convert it's aging karaoke CDG collection to MP3+G's.
It's neat because we get to have AVS behind the lyrics. You used to have to buy an expensive JSUB unit if you wanted to "bluescreen" anything behind a CDG song.
We've been using the system for the last year or so. Customer response has been excellent. No more skipping or garbled words. No more confusion looking for songs. It just all runs perfectly.
Let's go back to '96...
You ripped CDs with Christoph Schmelnik's Digital Audio Copy (DAC) for DOS because well, ripping under Windows 95 just didn't work.
You probably had a Pentium class machine at the time, because if you didn't, the MP3s would skip while you played them. While you probably had realtime playback if you were lucky, encoding MP3s with L3enc took forever.
Chances are, you still had some computers running Windows 3.1 (hey, Windows 95 wasn't used by everyone back in '96) so you used WinPlay3 to listen to your MP3s.
You probably did not have broadband back then, so you had to pick and choose your MP3s carefully. alt.binaries.sounds.music and search engines like oth.net (amazingly, still around!) were places to find MP3s. If you happened to have access to AOL back then, you could use AOL's "download later" feature with FTP sites so that the file would first download through AOL's fat pipe and be temporarally stored on AOL's server, so your download would continue even if the FTP site went down. Of course, if you had an ISP that gave you shitloads of shell space, you were lucky too.
Now my history is a little fuzzy, but I seem to remember CD burners EXISTING back in '96 but costing an incredible fortune. No one had them. So what to do with all these damn MP3s? Well, you kept them on your hard drive, or put them on Zip disks. Want to listen to songs you downloaded away from your computer? You recorded them via an analog connection from your soundcard to minidisc or cassette tape. Hi-Bias (chrome/metal) tapes really didn't sound that bad. I think I still have some cassettes with some oldschool MP3s on them.
I still remember the day I brought over my external Zip drive to a friend's house to show him MP3s. Yup, in true geek fashion he got really excited about being able to listen to near-CD quality audio that took forever to rip, forever to download and forever to record to tape. His father, wasn't impressed and shrugged it off as pointless. I wonder what he thinks about it today.
I still have the first MP3s I downloaded... Leeched it from the alt.binaries.sounds.music group and I'm sorry to say, it was the Macarena by Los Del Rio. I think I can forgive the 16-year-old version of me for that one.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Your excited tone and your views remind me of Thomas Jefferson.
In the book Founding Brothers, Jefferson's views on the revolution were shown quite clearly. After just finishing that book, and now reading this article, I'm reminded of the Federalists vs. the Republicans debate starting around 1790.
Federalists wanted a strong central government to strengthen the overall standing of the USA as a nation. Republicans wanted each state to have all powers it could, only cedeing in matters that had to be taken care of nationally (foreign affairs, etc).
Jefferson was a strong republican who championed individual liberty and free speech. He not only feared large central governments, but he did not trust "bankers and moneymen". He certainly would not trust corporations and groups like the RIAA were he around today.
He would see it much as you see it. The power of the internet lets citizens communicate without censorship or review by any government. Those in power do not like this. He would see great potential in this tool. The one thing that was totally unpredictable for Jeffereson is the power of corporations. The good comes with the bad.
We now have a way to communicate that is almost certainly above government intrusion. This gives power to the people, just as Jefferson wanted. Almost a dream come true if you told him of it.
But the power of corporations dulls the power of the internet. Corporations and the federal government are now like twin mountains of power. Two forces to potentially block freedom and liberty, when there used to be only one.
So in the end, we have the internet with it's great power, but depedendant on corporations. We have it's power and the technology to "build our own internet", and that is good. Jefferson would see it as a continued fight. Central power vs. the will of the people. It will always be a silent war waging in our hearts and minds.
Finally, one aside. As I look over this message, I think of days before the 18th century. The world once had two moutains of central power, governments and religion. It seems fighting two forces is not new.
"What the fuck is the internet?"
Time makes more converts than reason
From the article, he seems to be interested in giving power to the people as opposed to the corporations. BSD licence doesn't cut it. Embrace, extend, and now the avalible code is not good enough to build compatible software, and the corp. wins.
Oh, and having the source available matters a lot. I am not even the average programmer, and while I would be completely unable to improve on ifconfig, I believe that I understood enough of it's code (after a night of searching through it) to write the little utility I wanted to.
This is his blog:
frankel blog
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
"Napster was a company built on people doing things that are illegal," Frankel says. "That's wrong." Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster.
What a dirty bastard! I can see him wanting to promote Gnutella, but using the demons from hell to basically assrape the competition is bad, m-kay?
---
In other words, people like Frankel not only innovated, but they were paid quite well for their efforts. Now that's impressive. It demonstrates that others were/are willing to pay for the things they created, which is a pretty good way to determine if you have created something of value.
And this is where the monetary system of value really breaks down. Linus (to borrow your own example) brings insane amounts of value to very BIG players in the computing industry (IBM, HP, RedHat, etc) and yet he makes a standard, middle-class wage.
Linus is one of the most valuable people on the face of the earth today - he certainly brings more value to the table of humanity than the blathering but closely watched G.W. Bush!
He is one of the rare, true heroes - one among those people which do wonderful things and then wonder why everyone gawks at hime/her for doing so.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
and
(one in the middle)
If he is "dangerous", it's because he gives all the other geeks an inferiority complex.
Actually, copyright holders can do this without ever licensing their program under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This doesn't have anything to do with the GPL.
You can't grant permission you don't have, regardless of the copyright license. But this GPL "restriction" you talk about is not a restriction at all and "get[ting] shut-down" (if you mean being compelled to stop distributing the program) is greater under the BSD licenses, not lesser. When IBM modifies a program to include patented ideas and then they distribute that program under the GNU GPL, they license "everyone who uses any code from the [program] to practice [the] patented technology" (according to the FSF's GPL quiz).
Under the BSD licenses (either the old or the new) there is no language covering patents at all. One does not simultaneously receive a license to practice the covered technology with the code from the patent-encumbered program. And under the BSD licenses embrace-and-extend is a constant threat to one's ability to improve the program based on someone else's published improvements. The GNU GPL doesn't have either of these significant problems.
Digital Citizen
If there is a patent covering your program you can be stifled from distributing the program. Distribution of the program is a power under copyright law, so therefore another's patent can stifle your copyright power. This isn't the same as losing copyright power, but for the duration of all of the patents covering your program, this has almost the same effect.
Digital Citizen
I believe that assigning copyright to the FSF involves a contract where copyright reverts back to the previous copyright holder if the FSF is somehow unable to license the work under a free software license. So it's not a permanent copyright transfer, although the conditions for copyright reversion are admittedly obscure.
Digital Citizen
Methinks it's unnecessary and maybe counterproductive to take him/her out of the system.
Keep him in that school system, drug him and send him to counseling until he fits into all the neat little rows and columns of the standarized test, standardized people state of mind that is the highest the mediocre thought processes of those that dream such up can muster
That is the problem. And not just for a few geeks.
Genius lives by its own standards. But. Genius must live within the society at large and just as it's inappropriate for society to dictate genius's norms, it is inappropriate for genius to dictate society's norms.
You touched on a point that I hadn't really thought about before. It seems that one aspect of genius is the ability (drive?) to try to do things the hard way and see what happens. Methinks it's essential for society at large that a few people do this. Those few pretty well need to be self-selected.
No, that would allow more restrictively licensed derivative works which would mean the freedoms of free software are not necessarily preserved for those who receive improved versions of the program. The freedoms of free software are for everyone to enjoy, not just those who receive a copy of the program from the copyright holder.
Distributing a program under the new BSD license or the Apache license is certainly free software, and it is a valued contribution to the community. But if the intention is to spread software freedom, not donate charitably to corporations, it's a good idea to make sure the software freedom stays with the program and its derivatives. And that's just what copylefted free software licenses are good at doing.
For the free software movement (as opposed to the open source movement which started over a decade later with a different philosophy and a different message aimed at a different set of people), who possesses the skill to improve the program is not the key to understanding software freedom. Also, "open"ness is not a relevant criteria for determining what constitutes a free software license.
Digital Citizen
Who cares if he gets fired with all that money? He should just quit and write oss if he would like. That is if aol doesn't own him.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
It's going to come down to a tool for Corporate Control. Look around. Who's spending the money on legislation? What are the doing with it, opening up access or trying to limit it?
(Score:-1, Derail)
Wait a sec... If you were talking about Linus Pauling , I might agree with you. Torvalds has done something else - stumbled on to the very powerful effect of peer production enabled by the Internet. What's so orginal about Linux? It's a variant of Unix. It's important to keep things in perspective. Personally I think Berners-Lee's achievement is much more impressive, without which Linux never would have happened.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
Mine was some weird parody of "Walk like an Egyptian" called "Lie Like a Clinton."
And yeah, WinPlay3
Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
"Things not to do:
Don't post this to slashdot. You will murder my cable modem."
Perhaps I've been wrong all these years, but I was under the assumption Winamp wasn't "Windows Amplifier" but WinAMP Windows Another Music Player.
I remember a lot of different AMPS, ModAMP, YAMP(Yet Another Music Player),etc. and WinAMP was one of the first AMPs made for windows along with MOD4WIN which wasn't free. Winamp was also among the first that was able to play mods within Windows. It was a testament to the quality of Justin's code that he was able to scrimp together enough cycles to play music with windows' overhead.
How could this not be more clear? Netflix "Manufacturing Consent" if you have any questions/doubts.
Corporations love the BSD license.
The Internet is what you make of it.
If you see it as a delivery tool for useless Flash content, pornography, and pirated software, then it is.
If you see it as a way to link up diverse groups of humans across the globe, then it is.
If you see all of this as completely irrelevant, and see the Internet as an exchange platform for network traffic and bandwidth (the only thing that really matters), you are probably evolving.
What is ironic is that we are using the tool for corporate distribution to talk about the tool for corporate distribution.
How the corporations wish to use the Internet and how they wish it to be used is totally irrelevant. Commercials on websites? Stop going to the websites. Spam mailing from companies? Never buy anything from them again. Corporations rely on the fact that no one will stop using the Internet because it's suddenly become critical to existence. The Internet is a utility, just like power or water, only - instead of being measured in KW/h or gallons, it's measured in bits per second. And the great thing about it is that yes, Virginia, you can turn it off.
Stop thinking that the content on the Internet matters. The usage of the network is nothing compared to the continued existence of the network itself. As long as that exists, what anyone else wants is irrelevant. It's what you and your IPSEC peers want and need that is important.
The response to this garbage is to make the Internet into what it was meant to be: loosely connected confederations of smaller networks. I don't know about you, but I could live without 90% of web content. The other 10% is not generated by corporations. They can have "The Internet". I'll take the bandwidth, please.
-k
'Cuz I know that if I did that stuff at my company, I'd be told not to let the door hit me on the way out...
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
am I the only one that thinks things would be different for him if he wasn't worth $100 mil?
I mean, he's obviously very sharp, but would he really be "the geek's champion" if didn't have any money?
I doubt it. Winamp shows up about 5 years later and he's probably writing linux software, doesn't get paid enough and bitches about how stupid management is.
if he really wants to subvert corporate controls, GPL is the way of the warrior.
If you really want to convince people that licensing the code they write under the GPL is in everybody's best interests, a touch less of the "what you've done is nice but it's still not good enough" attitude would be helpful.
Meaning as an article, that guy is me. I generally see less than 100 links, when posted as a comment.
;)
Don't worry.
PS Suppose I have to make that a bit more clear.
It's funny, after getting WinAMP 5 I was reminded of back playing back with some of the earliest versions when you couldn't even save playlists or do pretty much anything but actually play the songs. At that time there were already other programs (like MuseARC) around which were older and had more features so I don't think WinAMP gets the honor of being the first, and it probably didn't really hit its stride until version 2. Of course there are a lot of reasons why WinAMP is now the standard and those other programs are history.
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
WinAmp is not short for "Windows Amplifier" its the windows version of GNU AMP (Another MPEG Player/Audio MPEG Player) with yes, a GUI frontend. AMP 1.0 predated WinAmp by well over a year, the betas, probably much longer.
But if we say its something else, we come across as a wiz-kid, don't we?
He is the guy responsible for the series of Atari chips beginning with Stella on the 2600. (It was the bare minimum for display) He went on to create the Amiga stuff and from there into medical imaging applications. Cool Guy.
The most interesting aspect of his designs were their inherent hackability. He left key bits exposed to the programmer that allowed for technique to be developed beyond the target for the hardware.
Blogging because I can...
Five years ago the Net was very new to majority of the world. I agree that it is less stable than mediums that have long been matured (television, newspapers, radio.) However, as it matures more, it will resemble those mediums, i.e. the most popular, established sources will stay the same over long periods of time. Right now five years is a huge amount of time in the history of the Net. Two years is pretty long too, and look how stable things have been in the last two years.
I seem to remember CD burners EXISTING back in '96 but costing an incredible fortune. No one had them.
I had one - I believe it cost $400 or so, and was a 2X.
I do remember using L3Enc to encode - on a P60 a three-minute song encoded at roughly 0.2x. After a while I got a hacked Fraunhofer codec - slower but sounded better.
Nevertheless, using both work and home machines, I managed to create some 20 odd CDs full of albums and MP3s.
WinAmp was a godsend because it let me donate an MP3 CD to a friend with the WinAmp EXE and evern the most PC clueless person "got it" immediately.
I just revisited those old '95 and '96 era CDs recently... I figured it was time to back them up. Amazingly, not one of them had bit errors. Kodak Gold was a good CDR brand - even if each blank did cost $5 each in 1995.
And the MP3s still sound okay today, even compared to Lame APS settings. I think I was lucky to avoid using the Xing encoder, or one of those nasty ones with a cut-off around 15KHz or something.
Da Blog
NO WAY, Not me... i'm holding out for $110 mil.
(actually really I can be had for $19.95)
Hi Eric,
.edu instead of aol.com. Everyone on the internet was pissed off at the AOLers, a feeling which still resonates to this day. AOL still thinks of themselves as "The Easy Way to get onto the Internet", so people still think of them as "The Idiots way to get onto the Internet".
I have noticed a tendency among younger folk of non-cluelessness among AOL users. I don't know if this is because AOL has services which are useful to clueful teens, or simply because younger folk have had the internet as a part of their lives more so than the older AOLers. Either way, hey if it works for you, who are we to criticize?
But what you may not know (or remember) is that there is a history of AOL being 'the gateway drug to the internet'. Countless people have used AOL long enough to get a clue, then dropped them in favor of services which met their more sophisticated needs. I was a college freshman during the September that never ended. People would assume that I knew all kinds of things about the internet that I didn't, simply because I had a address that ended in
Good luck at UF in the fall. Who knows what your September will be remembered for? (With condolences to the incoming class of '01).
actually. The appeal of the hardware lingers. It is a bug much like music is.
:)
You can ignore it for a while, but every so often it strikes...
Seems that embedded tech is going to continue on its upswing for a while yet.
Recommend me a kit. I will take a hard look at it.
(Board Applications Engineer looking at the greener grass
Blogging because I can...
Public Domain is easy. You put a disclaimer at the top saying "This had been released by me to the public domain".
why would anyone download anything they already owned..!? my bandwidth is precious, I would never waste it on downloading something I already owned...
i'll explain: say you own a phonograph, an eight track, a cd, a tape, a record, a vcr-tape, a dvd, etc. generally, it's in a format which you cannot read on your computer. many times now, the industry has forced format changes onto us. that has left a trail of "orphan rights." rights to things which you paid for, but can't play anymore. you might not even have the original file anymore, given that it's been so long since its format was the convention. if you own (or once bought) an eight-track of the dubie brothers greatest hits, you either buy an eight track player, or you can just download the mp3.
with the advent of broadband internet connection, generally speaking, it's cheaper and easier to do the download than to buy the eight track player.
back to the topic of orphan rights, consider the number of scratched cd's, warped tapes that got caught in the gears of your tape player, records that got melted in the back seat of your car on a hot day. etc. the physical demise of the original storage format doesn't mean you lost the right to the music.
another example: my house was once burglarized. the burglars took about 50 cd's. in that case, i certainly still consider myself to have the right to play that music, given that the physical cd was stolen, and i paid for the right to play that music.
there are many other cases of how an orphan right might exist. i just wanted to present a few solid ones, here, to fortify the idea.
my own belief is that there are so many "orphan rights" out there that the music industry has no right to chase a downloader. nor should it be granted any presumption (of guilt) when it DOES catch a downloader. it simply cannot prove that the downloader is not the holder of an orphan right to the file, and our legal system requires proof, in criminal cases, "beyond a shadow of a doubt" -- and in civil cases, "beyond a reasonable doubt." chasing every downloader of copyrighted files would be the equivalent of chasing every guy on the street with a bag of groceries. many of those grocery carriers have already paid for what's in their hands, and sending police after them all would be asinine.
given a random downloader, and a random file, my belief is that the industry can establish guilt neither beyond "shadow of a doubt" nor beyond "reasonable doubt". the "orphan rights potential" blocks reasonable doubt (the weaker of the two standards) in almost every case. so, my belief is that the industry lawyers would have to prove, specifically, that a downloader does not have an orphan right to the file. and that's not an easy task!
these facts should be enough to shut down the lawsuit bonanza they've been chasing.
but wait, there's more! consider that there are enough "alienated orphan rights" out there - i.e. rights which people have forgotten they even had, and that nobody claims, but that were CERTAINLY paid for, that there should be sufficient right to justify free internet file libraries. that is, unless you think those rights should just evaporate entirely while the little people get sued by megacorporations for downloading the exact same files.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
If you've downloaded a song in the past few years, it's in large part because of Justin Frankel. Seven years ago, when he was just eighteen, he invented Winamp, the first software program that made it easy to play digital music on your computer.
Yeah, stupid me. And I thought it was because of programs like WinPlay3 and all those pirate groups (Rabid Neurosis, anyone?) that started to rip cds and distribute them via MP3 that this started.
Sweet memories... When I first got that free version of WinPlay3, my computer could only play back songs with 22khz and in mono because it was so slow, and it took half an hour just too get one song - my first one was "Lodi Dodi" by Snoop Doggy Dogg. Heh.
Nowadays I just buy CDs, mp3ize them and play them back with either mpg123 or mplayer. NOT winamp. And when I download songs, it's mostly from legal sources, like EMusic. But then I guess I'm not most people....
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Good answer.
.wav)).
Yeah, I agree with you, it's just that most of the examples don't apply to me, so I never thought of them (mostly cos I appear to be a generation beneath you). My whole music collection is either on CD (which slowly filters onto my hd as ogg/mp3), or vinyl (which I wouldn't want to convert anyway (though I am in the process of archiving as
Incidentally, I wonder if (legally) you are correct in saying
my house was once burglarized. the burglars took about 50 cd's. in that case, i certainly still consider myself to have the right to play that music, given that the physical cd was stolen, and i paid for the right
Ethically, yeah, that's a good standpoint, but if the physical discs are stolen, are your rights to the music stolen as well..?