Gene Kan (September 6, 1976 — June 29, 2002) was a

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

-born Chinese American

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

file-sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...

programmer who was among the first programmers to produce an open-source version of the file-sharing application that implemented the

Gnutella Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million compute ...

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technolog ...

. Kan worked together with Spencer Kimball on the program called "gnubile" licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. Kan graduated from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1997 with a major in electrical engineering and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

, and was a member of the student club the

eXperimental Computing Facility Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization at University of California, Berkeley. The "Experimental" description was given in contrast to the Open Computing Facility and the Co ...

(XCF). In June 2000, when Kan was 24, he formed a

distributed search engine A distributed search engine is a search engine where there is no central server. Unlike traditional centralized search engines, work such as crawling, data mining, indexing, and query processing is distributed among several peers in a decentrali ...

known as InfraSearch.com with Steve Waterhouse and another friend. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen was an investor in the start-up. InfraSearch was purchased by Sun Microsystems on March 6, 2001 for $12.5M USD in Sun

stock options In finance, an option is a contract which conveys to its owner, the ''holder'', the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a specific quantity of an underlying asset or instrument at a specified strike price on or before a specified da ...

. The acquisition became part of the

JXTA JXTA (Juxtapose) was an open-source peer-to-peer protocol specification begun by Sun Microsystems in 2001. The JXTA protocols were defined as a set of XML messages which allow any device connected to a network to exchange messages and collabora ...

project at Sun. Kan joined Sun as an employee, and continued to work with the technology. Kan was relatively well known in internet circles for a testimony he gave in July 2000 at the

Senate Judiciary Committee The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, informally the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a standing committee of 22 U.S. senators whose role is to oversee the Department of Justice (DOJ), consider executive and judicial nominations ...

Hearing on "

Intellectual Property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

in the

Digital Age The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during t ...

". Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich,

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professiona ...

CEO Fred Ehrlich, and others also gave testimony at the hearing. In his account, as the United States Senate decides the fate of companies like Napster, he stressed that "technology moves forward and leaves the stragglers behind," and that "the adopters always win, and the stalwarts always lose". Kan was advocate of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing and some credit him, along with other Gnutella pioneers, as its originator. He argued that it is part of an emergent technological area called distributive computing. On June 29, 2002, he committed suicide. The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head. Kan was 25 years old. Prior to taking his life, Kan updated an electronic copy of his resume hosted on a

server to read "Summary: Sad example of a human being. Specializing in failure." An independent

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

was planned for Gene Kan after he died, but it never started production.

References

External links

Wired News: Quiet, Sad Death of Net Pioneer

* ttp://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-942180.html cNet News.com:Gnutella pioneer Gene Kan dies
Yahoo links
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Spanish version
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kan, Gene 1977 births 2002 deaths British people of Chinese descent American people of Chinese descent Suicides by firearm in California British emigrants to the United States UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni 2002 suicides