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at Napster. You’ll form an opinion, and one usually laced with some variable amount of disdain, as past experience has shown. And of course it will be wrong, because you have no idea what goes on behind closed doors, and you assume that we’re all idiots, as past and current experience is also showing.

“Then you’ll post it to this list, or to some other forum, and by the hand of some perverse irony, it will suddenly become fact and spark discussion. Soon after, it will have spread all over IRC or e-mail lists or Webboards or Bulletin Boards, and the world will go on, as it always seems to, unresponsively saturated with one more piece of misinformation. We’re not going to correct you. Yes, we hold the answers. Yes, you’ll eventually find out most of the answers—no one’s debating that (especially since we’re not trying to stop you). Reiterating that point over and over is a waste of breath and bandwidth, and often times serves only to antagonize us.

“We can’t give you any information because Napster is not some garage organization working off of some cliché Pentium and 486 laptop, but rather an incorporated company with a development team, marketing team, bizdev [business development] team, and an executive management team. Hypothetically speaking, if I were to have a strong desire to give you all the information you needed to write a complete client, I couldn’t. It’s not mine to give any more, it’s the company’s. . . . Oh yeah, and it would be nice if you didn’t assume we were all stupid, which is ignorant, and a gross underestimation. Almost all the Napster developers are also open-source developers.”

Evan Martin wrote an immediate and public apology. “I didn’t know anyone would be offended. I didn’t even know that anyone was listening!” he e-mailed. “I’m sorry this has caused you so much grief. I’d like to reiterate that everyone who’s taken the effort to get to this point has demonstrated their dedication and respect for your product. Most of us just find it fun to hack.” Once the outside programmers discovered that Ritter and Shawn were listening, they would occasionally ask polite questions about why the Napster team had done the things that they had, or if they were working on fixes to certain problems. Torn between protecting their work and feelings of hypocrisy for protecting it, especially given everything that was going wrong at Napster, the young men sometimes gave answers that