If you listen to music on your computer, the word “nullsoft” probably rings a bell. It rang one for me when I came across a reference to it earlier today, but I couldn’t imeadiatley place it, probably because of the context I found it in: “America Online’s Nullsoft unit”. Nullsoft is, of course, the developer of Winamp, the favourite music player software of most people who have been using music playing software since before Windows Media had visualizations. I did not know they belonged to AOL. Apparently they do, and have done so for the last four years. I wouldn’t have guessed it, largely because during those 4 years the Winamp website has consistently sported editorial commentary with a palpable anti-RIAA (and pro-skateboarding) edge, something most major tech industry websites don’t have. America Online seems to make a habit of purchasing somewhat rebellious players in the tech industry – they paid for Netscape even after the browser wars were lost and have sheltered it through several years of rearguard attempts to develop an open source alternative to MS Internet Explorer. Which may not be rebellion on a Brando scale buy at least isn’t a mainstream sort of thing to do.

In any case, Nullsoft does indeed belong to AOL. The interesting thing, according to this article from C/Net UK, is that during the time Nullsoft has been salarying their employees with “you’ve got mail” money, those employees seem to have been giving at least 50% of their time to projects to embarass or even harass AOL. Several of those projects appear to fall squarely in the grey penumbra of the law, such as Gnutella and other unspecified “MP3 search engines”. Most recently, they released “Waste”, designed to allow small (10 to 50) groups of people to share files and messages securely and anonymously. For what it’s worth, CNN seems to think Waste and others of this newish class of mini file-sharing networks represent the future of illegal file-swapping. Waste was, upon release, immeadiately torn off the website by AOL. The source code made it’s way, of course, into the open source realm and can now be had from it’s new home on Sourceforge. AOL must be stewing, but shows no signs of letting this new straw be the one to break their contract with Nullsoft’s back, either.