Winamp player development discontinued

“Winamp.com and related web services will not be available after December 20, 2013. In addition, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before this date. See release notes for improvements in this latest version. Thank you for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years, ”a sad message was posted on Winamp.com today.

Thus, the version of Winamp 5.66 will be the last in every sense of the word. The glorious history of the legendary program is over.

From a 2010 article by The Men Who Stole the World :

In 1997, Justin Frankel, an 18-year-old hacker from Arizona, wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, a must-have program for Windows computers, and helped revolutionize the digital music industry. In the 18 months after the release, 15 million people downloaded its program. Three years later, Frankel wrote Gnutella, a p2p file transfer protocol, decentralized, unlike Napster, therefore it could not be disabled by force. Millions still use it.

Justin made a profit very early. In 1999, after WinAmp fired, AOL bought the player and Frankel Nullsoft company for about $ 100 million. Frankel became an AOL employee, who was also very wealthy in his 20s.

This was not a wonderful merger. Together with Nullsoft, Frankel had to write the best software he could and give it to nothing. At AOL, software trading has had a detrimental effect on product quality. Frankel recalls: “What I was working on was like trying to profit from each product. We make a deal with these companies, so the product must earn. But no one cared about the user’s opinion. ”

Meanwhile, Frankel wrote Gnutella in his spare time. This was a great idea: unlike Napster, the system is completely decentralized, without a main server and without an “OFF” button that lawyers could click. He posted it on the Internet in March 2000 with a note “See? AOL can do good things! ” But Napster’s reinvention didn’t make Frankel fall in love with AOL, a huge Internet company trying to reunite with Time Warner, just during the Napster lawsuit. He quit in 2004.

Then he, instead of basking in the glory of the glories of his creations, simply left. He no longer worked on Gnutell and did not try to capitalize on this project, even after 10 years LimeWire - the most popular client of the Gnutella network - still has 50 million users. “I wrote Gnutella to prove that this is possible. Let's not profit from this. So it makes no sense to do anything with this, it's a concept. ”

Frankel, having recently moved from San Francisco to New York, now works for his company Cockos (don’t ask), which is developing the Reaper audio package. He constantly improves it, and works very closely with his customers, tens of thousands, not millions. “This is not the task of constant growth and struggle for the image of the company. I just enjoy the process and do what I like. ”