According to his .plan he is off:

http://www.1014.org/

Seems to be in direct connection with AOL's reactions to his waste p2p project. After Gnutella and the recent Winamp development it seems like the right decision to me.
dev0

01:48 < Justino> I'm gonna leave aol soon
01:48 < Justino> finally

Edit: image removed

Where is that from? Landoleet?

Thanks AOL-TW, for being a complete ass, paranoid control freak and for driving away your best programmer.

Geez, if you sell out, deal with the consequences.

Considering I'm sure they lads at Nullsoft got paid a few mil when AOL bought them out...I don't see what he's complaining about.

Actually Nullsoft got $86 Million, as part of the $400 Million buyout
of Spinner.com and Nullsoft back in 1999.

What I'm worried about is... will the quality of Winamp suffer? I still think it is THE BEST audio player out there. Winamp3 was handled by someone else, and we all know where that went.

Hopefully before he leaves, they will just release a 2.99 final bug-free version. No new anything, just take the code as is now, clean up all the known bugs, and release.

Or maybe he'll start work on another player... hmmm...

Great. I'd be more than glad to get part of that $86 mil., no questions asked. I can even program in Visual Basic 3.0 on Windows 3.11 if they tell me to.

Really, what is he complaining about...he's got it made till the end of his life while the rest of us go through the usual 9 - 5 rat race every day...ooh, I feel so sorry for him...

I'm reminded of the fable, "...a full meal in bondage vs half a meal in freedom"

Thankfully, he's now got the freedom and the meal.

If someone offered you 86 million and said "oh btw, you can never listen to music again" would do you do it?

No one can stop me from doing that.

And Justin is now free to leave and do whatever he wants. I just don't understand why he is upset that people who paid him 86 mil. seem to want to have some sort of control over what he is working on....I find that to be a pretty obvious thing.

Here's an article from The New York Times (requires sign-up) about this.

I love their description of Nullsoft and Frankel. What is this wriiten by the writers of Star Wars?

It will be interesting to see what he does if/when he does leave, Arseholes On Line own the Winamp name and there are millions of websites that point to winamp.com To switch people over to a new player would be hard work (perhaps he could hookup with Peter ), you can expect once he leaves aol will tighten their grip on winamp and force more arsehole type tie ins.

Well, I don't think he's particularly bitter about it. I think this is just a revelation that he's not living the way he wants and the way to change it is to leave. I'm pretty sure he understands why they want to have control over him.

Just a wake-up call.

Couldn't Justin just release the p2p program independently of nullsoft? Or is (was?) he not allowed to?

Surely what he works on in his free time doesn't matter to them. All they care about is Winamp right?

Not that one as it has Nullsoft all over the source file, and he could spend alot of his $80 million (probbably only $20 million is it was inversted in the stock market...) defending that move, much better to take a month or two out and rewrite it.

I see. Thanks Spoon, and thanks for dbpoweramp too.

Depends on how his IP contract was written. for the company I work for, any ideas that can be argued to have come from my time of employment (as are the ideas behind WASTE for Justin) belong to the company.

Funny, that was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the news.

Well, he didn't even try to claim he wrote WASTE on his own time -- it was released © Nullsoft, not © Justin Frankel. Still though, the release might've been valid (even if he wasn't authorized to make it), because he was an employee of Nullsoft and responsible for some of their releases on the past (basically everything on nullsoft.com), so it could be argued (successfully, I think) that he was acting legitimately as an agent on their behalf. Thus even if what he did was without AOL's approval, it's still legal for us to use it (they could fire him or something, but not undo his actions). Sort of like if a car salesman sells you a used car for less than his boss has authorized him to do -- he might get fired, but they can't say "oh, he wasn't allowed to do that" and come take the car back. Once you bought it legitimately from an agent of the company, it's yours, even if the agent overstepped his authority in doing so.

Unfortunately even with all that it looks like WASTE is still illegitimate, because it includes code from the RSA people that is not GPL-licensed. With that ripped out and replaced with encryption from SSH or GPG or something else open it might be okay though (if you're willing to defend against a possible AOL suit anyway...).

Login: justin Name: Justin
Directory: /home/deadbeef Shell: /usr/local/bin/tcsh
Never logged in.
New mail received Thu Oct 9 15:07 2003 (PDT)
Unread since Mon Mar 10 12:28 2003 (PST)
Mail forwarded to: justin@blorp.com
Plan:
Jan 22, 2004

Well, it took a bit longer than I (or likely anybody else expected), but after
four and a half years, I've resigned from my position at AOL. Yay/sigh/etc.

This will likely be the last time I update this .plan, but I might find myself
updating the .plan of justin@blorp.com.

peace out.

eof