Lev Grossman profiles Shawn Fanning, Justin Frankel, Bram Cohen, and Jon Lech Johansen — the guys who wrote Napster, Winamp, BitTorrent, and a DVD decoding program, respectively — against Steve Jobs and iTunes:

On April 28, 2003, the very day TIME published a grand excursus on the explosive growth of file sharing, Apple unveiled the iTunes Music Store. At the time, it was difficult to see why iTunes would succeed […] It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.

It takes a lot more work to make something easy than it does to make it free.

The Competitor to Free is Easy