Nullsoft
More info
- Creator
- Justin Frankel
- Released
- 1997–
- Owner
- AOL (from 1999)
The company behind Winamp, whose name was a dig at Microsoft and whose founder kept releasing things its parent company didn't want released.
Justin Frankel wrote Winamp in 1997, aged nineteen, and the name Nullsoft was a joke: smaller than micro. The skinnable player with the llama slogan became the default program of the MP3 era, and SHOUTcast let anyone run an internet radio station. NSIS, the installer system originally written for Winamp, still ships with countless Windows programs.
AOL bought the company in 1999, an odd match from the start. In March 2000 Frankel published the Gnutella file-sharing protocol, and AOL pulled it within a day, long after the source code had escaped. Frankel left in 2004 to found Cockos, maker of the REAPER audio workstation. Winamp itself was sold on in 2014.