[WorldMaker]

I don't recall the full tumultuous journey, but highlights I recall were Nullsoft (original Winamp creators) towards the end were bought by AOL who did them dirty and then AOL forgot about Winamp as a property entirely for something like two decades through the Time Warner merger then divorce then the Yahoo! merger into "Oath" under Verizon. At some point in spinning Oath back out of Verizon and putting Oath's IP on the chopping block someone found Winamp in an old closet somewhere and sold the "brand" to whoever this new company is that so far as any can tell has zero relationship to the original Nullsoft in any capacity.

[thedoctor_o]

The pure Nullsoft Winamp was from 1997 to mid-1999 with AOL having Winamp under it's ownership until 2013 (technically until mid-January 2014) when it was sold to Radionomy (who then were bought by Vivendi but then bought themselves back under the guise of Audiovalley).

So that time with AOL covers v2.5 when it became free after starting out as shareware through to v5.666 along with the maligned WinAmp3 period. So that's whole a lot of not doing much but still producing releases for almost 15yrs. Winamp (& SHOUTcast) were sold before Verizon did it's thing with AOL.

-dro