For nine months, Frankel and his team worked in silence behind the corporate wall of AOL, in the company's San Francisco music headquarters. And then, one day in mid-March, the statement: a little program called Gnutella, hidden on a back page of Nullsoft's Web site. It was an early "alpha" version of what was to be an open-source (the code would be freely available to all) file-sharing system, like the increasingly controversial Napster program, but lacking the vulnerabilities -- centralized servers, lack of anonymity -- that made Napster so easy to attack.

What was Frankel thinking? AOL was in the process of merging with Time Warner, which in turn owns the EMI and Warner Music record labels. And EMI and Warner Music, as two of the five biggest members of the RIAA, are not fond of programs that allow users to pirate MP3 files. The program appeared on the Nullsoft Web site for just a few hours before AOL yanked the page down, issuing a terse statement declaring that "the Gnutella software was an unauthorized freelance project." Was Frankel trying to peeve his new corporate owners?

Nullsoft engineers had been watching the controversy surrounding Napster, and threw together Gnutella in the space of a few days as a way to prove that a decentralized system could out-geek the law. Their goal was less to annoy their new owners than to figure out how to improve upon Napster. As one person close to the Nullsoft staff explains, "They have 'fuck you money,' they can do whatever the hell they want and AOL can't take back what they gave them. I don't think that Gnutella was just done to [thumb their noses] -- AOL is insignificant. It was just the most interesting thing you could possibly be doing, AOL or no AOL."

AOL's punishment for its rogue programmers was minor: The company publicly disassociated itself from Gnutella, forbade Frankel to work on the program and hoped the embarrassment would end there. (Although Frankel, six months later, unleashed a second surprise for AOL: a little program called AIMazing, which helps eradicate ads from AOL's instant messaging program ... but that's another story.)

AOL's actions did not mean, of course, the end of Gnutella. Avid developers were savvy enough to download Gnutella before it disappeared, and before long they had reverse-engineered the program and distributed the protocols; in a matter of weeks, the Web was peppered with sites offering both the original Gnutella program and a number of clones. Six months later, more than two dozen versions of the software have been released by assorted developers.

The initial Gnutella software was hard to use: It had a confusing interface, and to connect to the network users had to scramble to find the Internet address of another Gnutella host (not always an easy task). But new versions such as Gnotella incorporated friendly Napster-like interfaces, let users design their own skins and smoothed out some basic networking issues. Shaun Sidwall, the Canadian programmer behind Gnotella, plans to incorporate a built-in host in the next version of his software, so that newbies can automatically connect to the network.

Dozens of programmers were thrilled to get a chance to tinker with Gnutella. But any technology needs its figurehead, and with Frankel hidden away in the back rooms of AOL, Gnutella needed a new spokesperson. It found one in Kan.

Gnutella -- and, for that matter, the entire P2P movement -- couldn't ask for a better representative. Like Frankel, gonesilent.com founder Kan is a quiet and youthful programmer with a love for technology. Unlike Frankel, however, he's a master at industry diplomacy. He's young and soft-spoken and chooses his words as carefully as a law professor, excising any "ums" or "likes." He sits stiffly, with his hands in his lap, and other than his collection of zippy cars (including an RX7 and a BMW) is utterly lacking in ostentation.

Kan has done an excellent job as an evangelist: He's appeared in the pages of the New York Times debating industry heavyweights like RIAA president Hilary Rosen and antitrust attorney David Boies. He's flown to Washington to discuss policy with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and earlier this month attended a P2P summit organized by computer book publisher Tim O'Reilly. Thanks to all the free publicity, Gnutella's traffic has steadily grown: A recent study measured 35,000 users in a 24-hour period. Much of this growth came during the days after the RIAA won a preliminary injunction against Napster, as fans rushed to find a new program to use. (An appeals court later stayed the injunction until next week's hearings.) Kan estimates that roughly a million copies of the program were downloaded from his site that day. Today, on an average day, tens of thousands of users use Gnutella to exchange MP3 files, plus porn, pirated software "warez," illegal movies and other digital detritus, both pirated and legitimate.

But all the traffic has put a strain on Gnutella, and the program's weaknesses are starting to show. Kan, ever the upbeat evangelist for the technology, cheerfully admits that Gnutella has had its faults; but he also believes that Gnutella is ready for widespread use. "At first you focus on building the car, and once the car is built then you focus on refining the car," he enthuses. "We knew the refining was around the corner and it just takes some time. We wanted to accelerate the best we could by coordinating developer efforts and encouraging them to raise the bar on usability. And it happened."

The Free Software Project
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