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chat. They told him they didn't mind if he released the client program, but they begged him not to post the source code for at least a couple of weeks. The problem wasn't the competition, they said; the problem was that others could use the source code to develop bot programs that automatically connected to all of Napster's servers and repeatedly searched for the same song. Ritter, Napster's security chief, had been too busy to write software that would weed out such bots. The teen assured them that he would hold onto the code. "The next day, that prick released it," Ritter said. And the author added insult to injury, posting rhetoric about Napster's betrayal of the open-source movement.

Sure enough, bots soon started to scan Napster, straining the system and allowing contractors like NetPD Ltd. to search methodically for users offering certain songs. NetPD, run by a man named Bruce Ward out of Cambridge, England, was the firm that provided Metallica with the screen names of the more than three hundred thousand Napster users offering up the group's songs. NetPD had arguably violated Napster's user agreement, which banned bots, and Ward and Ritter engaged in a months-long hacking dogfight as Ritter figured out where abusive searches were coming from and shut them down, plugging holes in the dike as they appeared.

More useful for garden-variety Napster users was a program written by software engineer Chad Boyda called Napigator. That program impersonated a Napster client when it contacted the real Napster system, but it could also hop from server to server before Napster linked them. Napster rejiggered its system to foil Napigator, and Boyda retooled Napigator to fool the new system. Napster changed again, and Napigator changed again. "They did what they should have done in the first place, and then we couldn't stop it," Ritter said. Privately, Shawn thought that Napigator was a good thing, as was Wrapster, which allowed people to swap movies or documents over Napster by disguising them as MP3s. "Why are we fighting napigator?" Shawn asked one Napster volunteer. "If our users want it, our users are right. If somebody wants to make something that makes it easier to navigate the network, more power to them. . . . Same thing with Wrapster; people want to share additional content types. Why fight it? We have to embrace what people want or we lose."

A far more serious threat to Napster came from an open-source proj-