Gene Kan
Programmer, Deceased Person
1976 – 2002
Who was Gene Kan?
Gene Kan was a British-born Chinese American 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 GNU General Public License. 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". Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, Sony CEO Fred Ehrlich, and others also gave testimony at the hearing.
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 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 after he died, but it never started production.
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- Born
- Sep 6, 1976
- Ethnicity
- Chinese American
- British Chinese
- Nationality
- United Kingdom
- United States of America
- Profession
- Education
- University of California, Berkeley
- Died
- Jun 29, 2002
Submitted
on July 23, 2013
Citation
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"Gene Kan." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 Apr. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/gene_kan>.
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