Important Notice
 

Well, I can't say I didn't see this coming, but here it is. Brennan and Aus have been laid off by AOL. Which means that there is no longer anyone working full-time on Winamp3/wasabi.player.

I hope that lone can keep up releases as they were before, but it's increasingly doubtful from my point of view.

I don't have anything else to say, except that I'm vindicated that my paranoia was well founded.

And that I hope you can see what the next step may well be. And that, despite all that, I feel fucked over.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it.
Good night.

What is the logic in firing the lead programmer of Wasabi and keep someone else on it? Unless of course Wasabi is now really dead?

The skinning and scripting engine of Wasabi is still used in Winamp 5, so that will be kept alive. In all likelyhood the rest will stagnate.

At least it's mostly open source so it will live on in some way...

Sad day.
Any word from Brennan/Aus? :(

FUCK!

/me puts AOL as #1 on personal hate list, MS move over!

-Plague

Microsoft is evil, but no one and nothing is as evil as AOL.

Microsoft are evil, AOL are just stupid.

nooooooooooooooooooo! :(

Evil/Stupid, whatev..
Both are reasons to hate..

DIE AOL, DIIIIIIIIIE!

-Plague

Well that sucks balls...what is this next step you speak of Russ? I'm scared...

Dammit!!! those fucking whore bastards!

As the creator of Wasabi, does Brennan get to take it with him?? he can join us on WasabiDev and be our Godly leader.

Even if he can't take it with him (which i suspect is the case)... he can start a "new" project. WasabII or something. It'll blow the socks off the real thing.

hope springs eternal. I'd like to see Bas and Aus post here again.

~WHEREamI

isnt wasabi player open source now...so cant he still work on it...jsut without pay now? I mean it sucks that they got laid off, but i was really hoping to see the full power of it after seeing what winamp 5 was like...i fugured the original had to be a lot better, but the dev builds arent that hot. every one ive installed has been a litle screwy in some way or other so i been using winamp 5 hoping to eventually find a stable build of it....

Wasabi.player is only partially open-source, and that's more of a problem than it looks.

Brennan can't really work on wasabi.player, since he's "tainted" by the closed-source parts of Wasabi, and AOL could sue him for theft of trade secrets, and probably sue me for good measure.

We're still optimistic that we can get a bit more of Wasabi open-sourced.

So is Brennan gonna leave Wasabi development for good?
That would suck, wasabi needs him.

-Plague

I'm sure he could give advice. It's just him coding stuff may be a bit dodgy, I dunno.

has anyone ever seen fightclub? tyler durden makes his own army... hmmmnnn...

as far as i saw it, brennan, aus and francis are wasabi. they put everything they know, and stuff they didnt know into it...

brennan COULD work on a new player built on wasabi so long as NON of it is the "paid for by AOL" code.

but, they say you sould always seek out good in the bad... brennan can now finish porting his game (madworld) from glide to openGL, and i rememeber him one saying "90% of the c++ i know was learned while writing wasabi", so think how much better he can make that game now... without AOL even being able to go near it, cos its brennans own project he did at home...

i hope to see brennan posting info about madworld betas soon and that he does come back to help the learners from time to time..

and aus can now save that money he was spending on "care pacakages full of maple syrup and Kindereggs" that kept him his job :p

:(

*Begins assembling sniper rifles and passing them out to all forumers who can learn to aim at AOL board members*
*Signals Bizzy D. to assemble the Stinger launchers for everyone else*

you mean they got fired??

yes

Its just too bad.
Iwas hoping that Wasabi would take over some day.

That might still happen, but it doesn't look all too good at the moment..
But I would be damned if Wasabi died because of this. That's simply unacceptable..

-Plague

indeed. simply unacceptable.

Err if you want to do that can you at least give me a machine gun?? I prefer many holes on them rathen than 1 hole to their head.

Seriously though..this sucks!!

NO NO NO NO!

I read the forums a lot, but I don't speak up much, but I think this is something that I have to comment on. I HATE AOL. ok fucking around with winamp3, building winamp 5 on old 2.x codebase thats gay, but sacking the TWO BEST wasabi programmers is short-sighted and incredibly stupid.

aaagh...wasabi.player is/was really starting to look good now. I would swear that it is now faster than wa5 and it has so much more potential, especially from a programming view.

I am really at a loss as to why AOL did this...I mean, obviously to save money, but fucking with someones life...someone who has spent like 3 years developing wasabi, and then they just sack him. its like 'yea you've done your job, you made wasabi, we used a bit of it in winamp5, your jobs done, you can fuck off now'. that is out of order. totally.

I for one, will always prefer wasabi.player to wa5, and I hope(d), someday, it becomes the main wa player, or a properly marketed different product (although this seems extremely unlikely as the two main wasabi programmers (of 3?) have now been sacked.

I feel that this is actually a very sad moment (and I will say that however stupid it sounds).

Brennan & Aus: I will always respect your work, I have always known that it is miles better than the 2.x codebase, and I was waiting, hoping and believing in the re-release (in say 2005) of wasabi player as the best player ever. Unfortunately it seems that that is not going to happen now.

Thank you for all the work you have put in, to what is now, a truly great product (b499c-f).

rip Nullsoft as we knew it.

So why did AOL acquire Nullsoft in the first place if they were just gonna lay off all the workers anyways?

That was 1999. This is 2003.

That sucks :( Wasabi & WinAMP3 are still by far my favourite :(

i'm sad :(
poor brennan & aus :(

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...(IDGNS)_1.html


so ya.. AOL just closed the whole gawd damn building down. so ya... nullsoft, aol mobile, and a few other things seem to be hit prettie damn hard. and ya, this pisses me off.

as for wasabi.player development, anything we can du now to keep it going, i'm all for it.

so nullsoft musst change their location?

Nullsoft should never have gone with the AOL deal. :(

Doesn't AOL know/care that this rubs of verry badly on them?

I mean few considered them saints before thiese things, but now that they are killin the few good things conected with their name, they are basicly digging their own graves.

Winamp 5 should have been the mark of something great, not a possible great end to an era.

They got MILLIONS of dollars. Yea, it was inflated stock money, but noone stopped them from cashing out their stock the next day.

And I believe there was a lawsuit against them that AOL helped bail them out of, or at least thats what I heard.

This is just a reflection of the shocking reality that the free things cant last forever. I mean, who was paying these guys? Not us, the people who use the software. AOL was. And now that they are hard for cash, they took a look at their bottom line and said, we are paying X amount of money for this unneeded side project to a free peice of software we give away, we need to save that money.

I am not saying I agree, or that it was right...but this is reality!

You sure? Lots of the Netscape people got hired to keep working on Mozilla...I think it would depend on whatever he signed...

When will we know more Russ?

You don't say no to 80 mil.

unfortunately, you're right..
I know I would have a really hard time turning down 80 mil.

-Plague

What do you mean "teh" was never cool?!?
It rocked! :)

NOBODY says no to 80 million. Think about it.

Brennan is still optimistic that he can still work on Wasabi, and he has the final call. So we can but hope.

You will know more when I tell you more. I will tell you more when I know more. I haven't a fucking clue when I'll know more ;).

Thats what I was saying!

As far as I know, from knowing people in similair situations, he probably will be able to. But he has to do it for free now.

Anyway, pass our love on to him, I know it must suck getting cut away from what youve worked on so hard, on top of being out of work. I highly appreciate all the work they have done.

I would offer my help with wasabi dev, but all I am good for is advocacy, bug-testing, and any website help you might need.

Really sad to hear this has happened. Thinking about it, it's not much of a surprise really, but deffinately a sad day for Nullsoft and all the Wasabi die hards. Corporate greed wins once again.

To be told to leave, after you've spent 3 years of your life developing something which I'm sure Brennan was immensely proud of, and seemed to be very much a personal project, must be horrible.

I'd love to help in any way possible to keep wasabi alive and moving forward. It's such a great concept, and it's just not acceptable to let it sit there and gather dust! it's got so much potential.

Couldn't agree more man.

We all appreciate the hard work you've put into Wasabi over the years Brennan, and I hope you'll be able to help out with any effort to keep wasabi alive. Wouldn't be the same without it's dad to look after it =) hehe

-Dan