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?"

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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: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.