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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?"
"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?"
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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).
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.
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.
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
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.
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
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!
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 + 3 = 5 They're using Winamp's 2.x engine that allows 3.x skins to work with it.
That's what they say. Personally I think they didn't like the idea of Winamp 4 Skins.
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.
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.
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to someone who contributes 2 lines of code to Apache perhaps but he is way more influential.
As for The Internet is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status I can only suggest that if there is at least two humans involved then any communications channel will become about celebrity status.
What's next, an edgy piece on Marconi? You assume they didn't have them at the time. The early 20th century was not averse to gossip and hero worship. eg Lindeberg. How does this sentence sound
The Aeroplane is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status. Lindy is no more important than someone who hands tools to the guy who is tuning Spirits engine before takeoff.
Yeah, what was his name again.
"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.
ok, so you're right. The man wasn't first in many things. BUT he's definately good at taking something that's a "first attempt" and raising it to a great implementation. I've been using Winamp for almost EIGHT years. Name a third party program (i.e.: not companies like MS) that's remained free for eight years, is still around and has the penetration that Winamp has. There are many other player softwares around, but none as good as Winamp. Gnutella... well, it's still around. Is Napster? (It's original form) hell even Kazaa's going to shit.. the point is the man has done a lot of good things for us.
Hell, my freshman year in high school, just as MP3s were starting their climb to popularity a large question was "What player do we use for em?" and the ONLY answer you would EVER get is "Winamp." Hell, I know some people who thought MP3s were exclusive to Winamp, because no one would even TALK about an alternative to Winamp. Still till this day it works fantasticly, and with Winamp 5 it's even a better VIDEO player than WMP, which I had used for my video needs. It's now the only media player I have on my computer short of PowerDVD.
You could say simlar things about John Carmack. Sure, the guy wasn't the first with 3d engines, but he sure as hell is the best at em.
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
But the interesting thing about Justin is that he's pushing the boundaries of what's going on far more than the guy who contributes 2 lines of code to apache. A bug fix is a bug fix is a bug fix, but he's actually trying to do new things. To be quite frank, the fact that he's managing to do a lot of this stuff before anyone else (or often better than anyone else) shows that he really is a force to be reckoned with. Remember, while the software may be more important than the creator, the software wouldn't be without the creator. Give the guy some credit.
I'm always interested to hear what he's doing, since he's usually coding in the unheard of places that the rest of us will be talking about as having been totally obvious next year.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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!
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.
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!
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...
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.