According to AP, AOL has made all but three of the Nullsoft staff redundant. The company was founded by Justin Frankel and his team of whiz-kids who invented the Winamp player and Shoutcast server so they could play MP3s.

AOL was so impressed that they handed over huge wodges of cash to buy the company in 1999 totally failing to notice that Frankel seemed mostly interested in winding-up AOL's stuffy management.

From his AOL office, Frankel posted software including the peer-to-peer program Gnutella. AOL, of course, is owned by Time Warner who have a lucrative back catalogue of movies and music which are ripped off and distributed under Gnutella.

Gnutella fixed Napster's fatal flaw which eventually caused it to collapse under the weight of the record industry's mighty briefs.

Frankel's big idea was that if you decentralised the whole operation the only way for his friends in Time Warner to shut it down was to go after every user. AOL execs did force Frankel to take down Gnutella, but it was already being distributed on the net.

Later Frankel posted a tool that removed the ads from AOL Instant Messenger and it was only a matter of time before he went too far.

Last year he penned a bit of code called Waste which was a private file-sharing system whose traffic is encrypted. In this case his big idea was that if the Musak biz could not see what WASTE users were sharing they couldn't sue.

When AOL took the program down, Frankel quit to spend more time building special-effects for his electric guitar.

Without him, it seemed that AOL was a quieter plaice and Nullsoft was a bit of a waste of cash waiting only to be shut down. Which it has been. µ