Nullsoft

» see nullsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nullsoft was a teenager in Arizona and then a handful of people in an office, and in seven years it shipped more software that mattered than divisions a hundred times its size. Winamp came out in April 1997 and SHOUTcast turned any machine with a connection into a radio station. Underneath both of them sat NSIS, the installer nobody outside the trade can name, which ended up wrapping a large fraction of all Windows software ever distributed.

AOL bought it in June 1999 for something around eighty million dollars in stock, which at the time looked like a company buying a music player and was actually a company buying Justin Frankel, then twenty. The arrangement never made sense in either direction. AOL was in the middle of merging with Time Warner and about to have opinions about copyright. Frankel was the sort of programmer who publishes what he finishes.

By 12 November 2004 Slate was reporting that AOL had purged Nullsoft down to three employees, and calling it the death of the last maverick tech company. That is the date most people use. The actual shutdown was slower and ran through the previous December.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the gnutella morning ~

On 14 March 2000 Frankel put Gnutella on the Nullsoft site. It was a decentralized file sharing protocol with no central index to sue, released nine months after AOL had bought his company and four months into the Napster litigation, with a note attached saying see, AOL can bring you good things. AOL ordered it down the same day and disavowed it as unauthorized.

It was already too late. Enough copies had been pulled in those hours that the protocol was reverse engineered within the week, and Gnutella went on to outlive both Napster and the company that leaked it. LimeWire and BearShare were both built on what came off that page before it was taken down.

He did it again in 2003 with WASTE, an encrypted mesh for small groups, and AOL pulled that one too. By then the pattern was legible to everyone including him.

~ the installer nobody killed ~

The piece of Nullsoft with the longest reach is the least glamorous. NSIS started as the thing that installed Winamp and became a general purpose Windows installer, released under a free license, small and scriptable in a way the commercial packages were not. I have shipped things wrapped in it without thinking about where the name came from, which is what a piece of infrastructure earns by working: everyone stops reading the title bar.

It is still maintained. The company that made it stopped existing in 2004 and the installer went on being developed by people who had nothing to do with it, which is roughly the best outcome available to any piece of software.

~ what was left by november ~

AOL closed the San Francisco office on 9 December 2003. Frankel resigned in January 2004 and started Cockos, which makes the audio workstation REAPER and is still going. The remaining staff were absorbed or let go across that year, and the November purge left three.

Winamp kept the Nullsoft name in its about box until AOL announced the shutdown in December 2013, which means the brand outlasted the company by nine years and everybody who built it by ten. That is the ordinary way an acquisition ends. What makes this one worth a stone is how long the small team kept publishing anyway, from inside the largest and most cautious internet company on earth, until it was made impossible.

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