Winamp player development stopped

“The site 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 more than 15 years, ”the sad message was published today on Winamp.com.

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 the article The Men Who Stole the World 2010:
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In 1997, Justin Frankel, an 18-year-old hacker from Arizona, wrote a free MP3 player called WinAmp, which became a compulsory program for Windows computers and helped revolutionize digital music. For 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 forcibly. Millions still use it.

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

This was not a wonderful merger. Together with Nullsoft, Frankel had to write the best software he could, and give it to the void. In AOL, software trade 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 nobody was worried about the user's opinion. ”

Meanwhile, Frankel wrote Gnutella in his spare time. It was a great idea: unlike Napster, the system was completely decentralized, without a main server and no “OFF” button that lawyers could click. He posted it on the Internet in March 2000 with the note “See? AOL can do good things! ”But re-inventing Napster didn’t make Frankel like AOL, the huge Internet company trying to rejoin Time Warner, just during the Napster lawsuit. He retired in 2004.

Then, instead of bathing in the glory of his creations, he simply left. He was no longer engaged in Gnutell and did not try to benefit from 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 make a profit out of it. So it doesn't make sense to do anything with it, it’s a concept. ”

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