Here come another interesting event in software industry. Nullsoft released a secured P2P software named WASTE on May 28, 2003. WASTE run under a enrypted, distributed network protocol, and it was released under a GPL license; the news was slashdotted. Three days later, Nullsoft’s parent company, AOL Time Warner, pulled it back and announced WASTE was an unauthorized Nullsoft’s copyrighted software. The official entry page of WASTE has been modified and declared the unauthorized software:
NOTICE OF UNAUTHORIZED SOFTWARE
An unauthorized copy of Nullsoft’s copyrighted software was briefly posted on this website on or about Wednesday May 28, 2003. The software was identified as “WASTE” (the “Software”) and includes the files “waste-setup.exe”, “waste-source.zip”, “waste-source.tar.gz” and any additional files contained in these files.
Nullsoft is the exclusive owner of all right, title and interest in the Software. The posting of the Software on this website was not authorized by Nullsoft.
It is like: “Here’s the cool stuff, you could view, modify and even distribute it. Oops, no, we regret, we made a mistake, it’s COPYRIGHTED. Don’t distribute it!!” This again, been slashdotted and brought up a hot discussion if the downloaded copy still maintain its right as it was released under GPL.
AOL is quick on its action to pull down WASTE. This isn’t the first time they are doing it. Justin Frankel, the co-founder and principal developer of Nullsoft, developed Gnutella and putting it on website in year 2000. But it was quickly taken down, though other developers had able to download the source in time or reverse engineer later to form the Gnutella network. The other time was AOL forcing Nullsoft to shutdown its MP3 search engine. AOL is obviously dislike anything Nullsoft done having conflict with its media business, not at least.
Although it looks probably AOL could claim its authority (Nullsoft’s authority), lots of copies of WASTE has been mirrored and shared among P2P network (e.g. eDonkey, Freenet). Dave Winer has posted the source code on second day of its release.
Further news:
[Update, Jun 10] The cache of google is no more caching the original page, you could get the mirror of those original pages at:
They have also setup the network based on WASTE. Download and follow the instruction if you’d like to join.
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