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Justin Frankel On AOL, Subverting The Status Quo

Posted by simoniker on from the null-to-aol dept.

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?"

3 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Anyone been following Winamp? by Sprite+Remix · · Score: 4, Informative

    2 + 3 = 5 They're using Winamp's 2.x engine that allows 3.x skins to work with it. Along with a lot of extra crap that could be downloaded as a 3rd party plugin. Only reason why Winamp3 failed was it was shipped WAY to early.

  2. Re:Half a billion?!? by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Informative
    Parent wrote:
    "He was paid in AOL stock, not dollars. What are 400 million pieces of toilet paper worth? Enough.

    400 sheets of toilet paper (Kleenex Cottonelle) on amazon.com go for $3.65

    400 million pieces of toilet paper = $3,650,000.

  3. Re:where credit is due... by The+Munger · · Score: 4, Informative

    Firstly, I don't work there anymore. Secondly, the employees have worked on OSS on company time. So the company uses OSS and contributes back. Sure, the main product isn't open source, but they have contributed back, and everyone has to make a dollar.

    --
    Refuse to make a statement in your sig!