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wild claim, and Shawn’s earlier reaction gives evidence to contradict it. While Frankel declined to comment, others who worked on Gnutella dismiss any conspiracy. The concept itself was so obvious that any sophisticated engineer involved in music-swapping would have considered it at some point, said Nullsoft veteran Rob Lord. The hard part was writing the code.

Frankel had done some serious thinking before deciding to compete with Napster. The Nullsoft crew had played with Napster when it first came out. “We looked at it and said, ‘There’s no way this is legal,’” said Ian Rogers, one of the handful of employees at Nullsoft and a friend of both Shawn and Dug Song, the w00w00 security expert. Frankel, Rogers, and Lord discussed the issue again as Napster grew at a mind-boggling rate and staved off a court-ordered shutdown. They decided they had to hedge their bet. The consensus was “It isn’t legal—but if it is, Winamp needs to do this,” Rogers recalled. “If it’s going to live, we wanted that functionality.”

Gnutella would have had some major headaches, were it not for a bout of self-restraint and the bonds of friendship. Just as the early Napster work had been done over an IRC channel that grew from a few w00w00 members to seventy or so Napsterites, rival Gnutella began in a small IRC channel led by Nullsoft employees. Old Napster aide Seth McGann, known as Minus to his w00w00 friends, got into the Gnutella channel for a bit of opposition research, criticizing the architecture of the system and trying to learn more. Then he saw a posting from someone who appeared to be in-house at Nullsoft. McGann used the information he gleaned to hack the man’s computer. Improbably, he succeeded in getting in, and from there he reached a server where McGann found encrypted source code as well as the names and passwords of early users. Debating whether to take the next logical step of the true black hat and try to steal and crack the source code itself, McGann hesitated. But he did begin boasting in the Gnutella channel about the access he had, offering up some of the passwords as proof. That provoked some excitement from the Gnutella developers, both those opposed to the breach and those wouldn’t have minded taking the code and splintering from the official effort. It also caught the attention of w00w00’s Song, who studied McGann’s account of what he had done and realized that he

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