Gnutella and AOL
When Justin Frankel quietly released Gnutella on the back page of the Nullsoft web site a few months ago it didn't seem too outrageous at first look. After all the 21-year-old Frankel was a hacker in he very best and truest sense of the word. His Winamp is one of the finest examples of freeware, however there was an interesting wrinkle - Nullsoft had recently been purchased by AOL.
For those of you that don't know Gnutella is an open source version Napster, the MP3 trading software. However with Gnutella you can trade any forms of ones and zeros, anything digital. That means in addition to MP'3 you could trade software, movies, etc.
The 21-year-old Frankel's creation and release of Gnutella did not sit well with the granddaddy of all the monolithic net corporations, and AOL pulled the page down just hours later. But the Genie was out of the bottle and thousands of copies of Gnutella had already been circulated. AOL's official response was :
"The Gnutella software was an unauthorized freelance project and the web site that allowed access to the software was taken down"
If the impending merger with Time Warner goes through AOL will own EMI and Warner music and the recording industry is the natural blood enemy of the Napster/Gnutella forces. AOL hasn't said much about the incident since it's original, terse, official statement but the rumor is that there is a serious rift between the full on corporate culture in Northern Virginia and the funky Nullsoft group out west.
Another rumor that is making its way around the 'Net is that AOL is working on releasing an official version of Gnutella. The AOLtella release would enable trading of files that are legal to distribute.
Whatever happens this little saga is an interesting example of what happens when button down corporate culture needs to aquifer groovy little start ups that believe in open source. In the end I believe the AOL will find a way to incorporate Gnutella and profit from it, after all that is what they do.
