So, I saw this news item the other day, and made mental note of it, but perhaps it’s worth a more permanent mention (if you…
So, I saw this news item the other day, and made mental note of it, but
perhaps it’s worth a more permanent mention (if you call
dsandler.org “permanent”).
A week ago Saturday, June 29 2002, Gene Kan killed himself with a gun. Gene was
a developer of the Gnutella
file-sharing network (a Napster-like service developed by Nullsoft and then
released into the wild), but perhaps more importantly, he was an ambassador:
he wanted to bring the technology, and understanding, of the system to
“normal” people. He started
gnutella.wego.com, a portal to build the Gnutella community. Gene was quiet, personable, and bright; he had a way with
words and could crystallize tricky issues for anyone to grasp.
Q: But the record companies now are saying very loudly that with systems
like Gnutella they can’t survive. What do you say to that?Gene: It pains me to say it, but I’m going to make an unbiased observation:
Industries are occasionally made obsolete by technological advances. Carrier
pigeons, for example, are largely on the dole these days.
He eventually became the CEO of Gonesilent.com, which was eventually bought by Sun.
Yaroslav Faybishenko, a friend of Gene’s, wrote a few words about
Gene and linked to Gene’s weblog (kept from the end of May through the end of June).
He had a page at
Berkeley, but for the time being all that’s left is
Google’s cache.
Gene was 25.