Gene Kan
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Gene Kan (1976 - 2002) was a peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer who was among the first programmers to produce an open-source version of the file-sharing application that implemented the Gnutella protocol. Kan worked together with Spencer Kimball on the program called gnubile licensed under the GPL. Kan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 with a major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
In June 2000, he formed a distributed search engine known as InfraSearch.com. 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. The acquisition became part of the JXTA 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 Hearing on Intellectual Property in the Digital Age [1]. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, Sony CEO Fred Ehrlich, and others also gave testimony at those hearings.
Kan had long been suffering from depression and was taking Prozac. On June 29th, 2002, he committed suicide. The cause of death was a single gun shot wound to the head. Kan was 25. Prior to taking his life, Kan updated an electronic copy of his resume hosted on a University of California, Berkeley server to read "Summary: Sad example of a human being. Specializing in failure.".
An independent documentary film was planned for Gene Kan, but it never started shooting.
