The Day The Software Died.

• Author: Harmon, Amy
• Position: Brief Article

One day, the free music-swapping software called Gnutella was there for the taking. A few hours and several thousand downloads later, it was not. What happened?

It seems Justin Frankel, the 21-year-old programming wizard who sold his digital music company to America Online last year, had posted Gnutella, which lets users quickly find and copy music files over the Internet, unbeknownst to his new corporate masters.

Gnutella is a variation of the popular program called Napster, which has set off a frenzied exchange of free music online. Whether Napster itself is doing anything illegal has yet to be determined, but the record industry is clearly not...