Justin Frankel On AOL

An excellent summary article on the last few years of Justin Frankel and Nullsoft's life.

"The most dangerous man in music is ready to rock. It's Saturday night in San Francisco as Justin Frankel, gangly and bed-headed, ambles through the warehouse garage he aptly calls his "playground." He has come here, as he often does, to screw around on his drums or his Moog or electric guitar. But first he needs his fog machine.

"It's around here somewhere," he says, checking under his makeshift concert stage, a riser set against a wall postered with naked women. Then he looks under his Porsche, his VW van, his Swiss military truck, his Go Big scooter, his gutted Audi. He pokes his head behind a hacked Xbox, pulsing the word SeXbox onto a forty-eight-inch flat screen. No luck. "I don't know if I have any CO2 cartridges for it anyway," he says, bumming. Not to worry, there's always his light-show laser. A twenty-five-year-old with $100 million deserves his toys.

If you've downloaded a song in the past few years, it's in large part because of Justin Frankel. Seven years ago, when he was just eighteen, he invented Winamp, the first software program that made it easy to play digital music on your computer. A few years later, he created Gnutella: the vast, and vastly controversial, online network that lets you swap songs. The fact that Frankel secretly did the latter while working at America Online, the company behind his multimillion-dollar buyout, made him both the Internet's greatest punk -- and hero. Now he's about to punk the industry again. "

News source: Slashdot.org