AOL gutted Nullsoft in 2004, ending the tenure of Justin Frankel, who built Winamp, Shoutcast, Gnutella, and WASTE while on AOL’s payroll.
Key Takeaways
Frankel wrote Winamp at 19, sold Nullsoft to AOL for $100M in 1999, then used that platform to undermine AOL and the RIAA.
Gnutella, released during the AOL-Time Warner merger, was fully decentralized – no central servers meant no easy legal shutdown, unlike Napster.
WASTE added encrypted, invitation-only file sharing, removing the observable network traffic RIAA needed to build infringement cases.
Frankel also shipped a tool stripping ads from AIM and removed WASTE on AOL’s 4th acquisition anniversary as a direct provocation.
After Frankel resigned in early 2004, AOL reduced Nullsoft to three employees and shut it down.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters widely note Frankel’s post-Nullsoft output matters: he founded Cockos and built REAPER, a cross-platform DAW that ships as a 16 MB installer and competes with Pro Tools.
NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) surfaces as an underappreciated Nullsoft artifact still actively used in production Windows packaging pipelines, including via Tauri.
There is consensus that the AOL acquisition-then-destruction pattern was wasteful; the prevailing read is that Frankel was never going to stop shipping unauthorized tools regardless of corporate incentives.
Notable Comments
@p2detar: Highlights NSIS’s assembly-like scripting language and its continued viability as a free InstallShield alternative.
@jackconsidine: Frankel still runs an active forum and personal Q&A page; he publicly opposes Cloudflare on decentralization grounds, consistent with his WASTE-era philosophy.
