Gene Kan

Gene Kan (September 6, 1976 — June 29, 2002) 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 . 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 ,and was a member of the student club the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF).

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 . 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.

...
Wikipedia