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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?"
...
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).
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"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.
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?
Don't trust any concentration of power.
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."
Ya know, once upon a time that's what we said about you kids who could just go out and buy computers instead of having to hardwire bistable multivibrators from discrete componants scrounged from the town dump.
Well, you take a geek genius, get him the hell out of the public school system as early as possible and let him do his own thing, he'll manage to "cut his geek teeth" somehow. His nature will see to it.
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, well, it doesn't matter after that what you give him to cut his teeth on. His teeth have been filed down to dull little stumps.
The equipment isn't the key, the enviroment is.
If you wish to protect the next generation of geek geniuses ( and do please bear in mind that "geek" doesn't mean "computer nerd") then do what you can to get them out of school and into a library.
Add a little peace and quiet and they'll manage the rest on their own just fine.
KFG