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?"

Comments

How geniuses come to be

[Atario]

From the article:

Unchallenged by classes, Frankel took control of his own education, largely directing his own home schooling. Around then, he also started messing with his brother's Atari 8-bit computer. By the time he started high school, he was a self-taught whiz.

It's because he cut his geek teeth on Atari 8-bits. I'm not just saying that because I used them too; see, the way the things worked were never officially documented. Everyone had to figure everything out for himself. This encourages tinkering, poking (and peeking), and prodding, and thus, technical ability. Either that or share info with others, which encourages geek socialization. Either way, you end up better (or at least with more geek-nature) for the the experience.

Rock on, Atarians...

Re:How geniuses come to be

[AtariEric]

Hear Hear!

As my moniker suggests, I was in the same boat that these two were in. Programming an Atari was different than programming today, in a sense: Atari's were quite limited; but since the were, expectations were not so high. It was quite easy to get near the "ceiling" of what one could do with the machine. The real geniuses, of course, pushed the envelope. What I'm concerned with nowadays is the lack of such machines; the closest we have are either complex machines with confising API's, or emulators of the previous machines which no one except retrogamers will even notice. How are we going to get our next generation of truly genius programmers without such platforms for them to "cut their geek teeth" on?

Re:where credit is due...

[The Munger]

The first time I came across Nullsoft was mucking around in Plush. I was getting into 3D graphics, and plush really belted along on my Power Mac 6100/60. And what's this... source code!

I've written the graphics engine for a 3D visualisation package since then. The sharing of source code benefits the world.

Re:where credit is due...

[xao gypsie]

this is why i love nullsoft. not really all the flashy or mainstream (except for winamp, of course) software, but stuff that certain people can really use that really doesnt have a closed source equivalent.

My Hero

[Jameth]

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.

Re:No. 1 punk my ass.

[afidel]

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Typo?

[eyegor]

I gotta disagree with that idea. It's funny, but not especially accurate.

Most of the people I knew at AOL were pretty smart. There are a lot of extremely cool technologies behind the scenes that make the system as a whole work very well.

That being said, many of the upper level managers have risen from the ranks and "grew" into the position they occupy today. They're frequently much better at the technological end of things and not so good at people skills (e.g. feckless yuppie bastards who think that $$$ := intelligence).

There is also quite a bit of trust that whatever is done, the end users will swallow gladly and keep paying WAY too much money for fluff and busy signals. They also pinned too many hopes on people sticking around once they got broadband.

I used to think that most AOL users were idiots. When it comes to technology, many are. Most people are those who don't want to know about computers.

David Kushner

[404notfound]

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.

Justin has changed karaoke

[t0qer]

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.