Gene Kan, the 25-year-old peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing developer and one of the brains behind Gnutella is being mourned by the online community.
It seems almost ironic that news of his suicide, on 29 June, has taken some time to hit the headlines, when he himself was a pioneer of moving information quickly around the web.
According to a report in Wired, Kan had recently removed his resume from his homepage on the website of the University of California, Berkeley. He replaced it with a note which read: "Summary: Sad example of a human being. Specialising in failure."
But Kan's track record indicates anything but. After the initial success of Gnutella, Kan and business partner Cody Oliver transformed their P2P research into a new kind of search technology dubbed InfraSearch.
InfraSearch was later acquired by Sun and became a central part of the company's own efforts in P2P and file share technology.
Kan was also called in to testify before the US Senate and advised the record industry to accept the realities of filesharing on the internet.
Oliver has posted a touching obituary on the website of the company behind InfraSearch, Gonesilent, which can be found here. Kan was cremated last Friday. His family have not released any more details about his death.
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