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enhanced features, presumably using a less antagonistic illustration. But Richardson checked with the company’s lawyers and decided against it. Why give out any more information than necessary about the company’s technology? Besides, it might provoke the record industry, which wouldn’t help Napster’s increasingly crucial search for new funding. Users would just have to stumble on the upgrade by themselves. The disappointed engineering team tried to drop the public some hints. Each Napster user’s screen included a box displaying how many users were logged in and sharing that user’s server. Once a week or so, Ritter or a colleague would flip a switch for a few minutes, and the display would show how many users were on the entire cluster. The number would jump from about eight thousand to about four hundred thousand. Most users probably thought the figure was a bug and ignored it. The engineering team’s single greatest triumph wouldn’t be acknowledged in the trade press for another six months, and the mainstream press never noticed at all.

The Napster team had a different sort of politics to worry about when it came to some of their other competitors. Napster’s chief asset was its software, and it was duly protective of its source code. But some of Napster’s biggest technological fans thought it should release the code. They subscribed to the same widespread ethic as the original Napster crew—pursuing hacking for fun and knowledge. But they also belonged to the subsidiary ethic of the open-source movement, in which the code is available for public inspection. The open-source movement was becoming increasingly important in software development, and it is best known today for using unpaid and widespread collaboration to turn Linux into a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. From time to time, open-source enthusiasts would harangue Shawn and the others to share the Napster secrets. Some of the more ambitious used technological clues about the way Napster worked to reverse-engineer and clone both the Napster client program seen by users and Napster’s back-end program for running its servers.

Among the first client clones was a buggy contraption called Gnap, written by a teenager. After the author announced its existence on Napster’s IRC channel, Ritter and Shawn quickly got hold of him in a private