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only nineteen, was Cody Oliver, most recently from Alabama. An unrepentant car freak, Oliver was also a programming ace working as a contractor at Nullsoft. Kan and Oliver became friends and eventually roommates, just two of the large number of peer-to-peer elites, including Shawn Fanning, who would be brought together over RX-7s.

“I’ve always liked cars, but I got into RX-7s because of the guys at Nullsoft,” Shawn said. He wasn’t content with his first RX-7, so he tried to sell it on eBay. That became a news item for the website CNet, which embarrassed Shawn with speculation that things must be going badly for him and Napster financially. So Shawn delisted the car and sold it to Oliver. Shawn bought another in Florida that didn’t quite suit him either, and sold that. “I was just trying to find one I really liked, and I finally found the silver RX-7 that I’m in love with,” Shawn said. “I mean, it’s a Mazda, and it’s pretty fast stock, and if you fix all of the weird flaws with it and do a few minor changes to it, they’re pretty fast cars.”

Car-club meals and late-night drag races on Fridays and Saturdays brought out Nullsoft coders like Frankel and his Gnutella coauthor Tom Pepper, Oliver, and some of the Napster crowd, including Parker, with an occasional appearance by Shawn. Almost every weekend, the crew would meet at office parks abandoned by workday’s end in Milpitas, Santa Clara, or other spots. With an average age around twenty, the young men had unlikely amounts of disposable income and a lot of workplace tension to get rid of. At a racetrack near Sacramento, Shawn joined in the drag racing, where speeds exceeded one hundred miles an hour. “I like accelerating, but that was the first time I could actually open it up and really learn the limits of the car,” he said. Trouble with the police wasn’t unheard of. “Some of the top people have been arrested,” said Oliver, naming no names. Oliver had the most reason to be annoyed when the police ended an evening’s festivities, since he usually won the races even when he loaded up his car with spectators.

Nobody cared who worked for which company. “There was no rivalry. Everyone had a lot of respect for what everyone else was doing,” Kan said. “Nobody had any kind of an attitude. We had fun.” Through his new roommate Oliver and the other people at Nullsoft, Kan kept tabs on the development of Gnutella. After AOL shut it down, the Gnutella program itself was released in the wild, but not the underlying code. Pro-

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