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From bayarea.com

Posted on Tue, Jul. 09, 2002

Pioneer of music-swapping site Gnutella dies

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Gene Kan, one of the pioneering developers of the file-sharing technology called Gnutella that took music swapping beyond the realm of Napster, has died. He was 25.

Kan died as a result of an accident, according to a statement released Monday by his employer, Sun Microsystems Inc. At the request of his family, no further details of his June 29 death were being released, Sun officials said.

He was among the first to develop an open source version of the Gnutella protocol -- a small bit of computer code used by a distributed network of PCs for massive file-sharing duties.

Gnutella came along as Shawn Fanning's Napster program became mired in lawsuits with the recording industry. Kan and a small clutch of developers honed the Gnutella protocol so that programmers around the world could make their own home-brewed computer applications -- each speaking the same language and capable of pointing users to shared music, video and software files.

The main difference between the Gnutella network and other file-sharing programs was a crucial one. Gnutella has no company to sue or central servers to shut down with a court injunction.

``There is no head to the Gnutella dragon,'' Kan told The AP in 2000. After that interview, Kan quickly became the ad-hoc spokesman for Gnutella's development during file-swapping debates surrounding Napster.

Kan lived in a Belmont home with other software developers during Gnutella's early days. There living room was strewn with desktop and laptop computers networked with high-speed cables as they tested early incarnations of Gnutella.

The group didn't invent Gnutella from scratch, Kan and company merely brought it into focus after an early version of a program appeared briefly on the Web site of Nullsoft, a subsidiary of America Online. The Gnutella code was only available briefly, but that was long enough for Kan and other developers to download it.

Kan acknowledged that some unauthorized files were being traded via the Gnutella network.

``How users make use of it, I hate to say it's not our problem, but it really isn't,'' Kan told the AP in an interview.

The simple Gnutella protocol spawned a legion of file-sharing programs that remain popular today. The programs LimeWire, BearShare and Phex all make use of the Gnutella engine.

In June 2000, Kan started Burlingame-based InfraSearch Inc., a peer-to-peer search engine technology company that he co-founded. It attracted high-profile investors such as Netscape alumni Marc Andreessen and Mike Homer. Most recently, Kan worked on advanced projects like JXTA at Sun Labs, pushing the envelope in distributed computing.

JXTA is an open source set of computing instructions that allows various devices connected on a network, from cell phones and wireless Palm Pilots and PCs, to communicate in peer-to-peer fashion.

``Gene contributed much to the industry, specifically in the peer-to-peer space,'' Sun said in the statement. ``Gene brought new ideas to the organization and stretched our thinking. Gene was a trusted friend and colleague, and we will miss him greatly.''

A memorial fund is being established in Kan's name at the University of California, Berkeley's College of Engineering, where Kan graduated in 1997 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.

No public services are planned.