Reuters.com - Gnutella Developer Gene Kan, 25, Commits Suicide - July 09, 2002

[Lucas Gonze]

Gene was a dark guy.  Also quiet and smart.  I liked him.

Funny the way this happened.  Death cements his status as the face of
Gnutella.  It's wierd the way that Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper are still
hidden away back there behind Gene, right where they'd have to be to keep
AOL Time Warner cool and generally avoid the media shitstorm.  The whole
association between them and Gene and Gnutella started because they were
roommates.  ...

>From 
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/09/29/gnutella_paradox/index1.html:

It's June 1999. The programming community is shocked. Justin Frankel, the 
talented young programmer who helped create the Winamp and Shoutcast MP3 
players, had sold his company Nullsoft to America Online. For at least a 
year, Winamp had been the most popular software program in the MP3 
underground, one of the first tools that made it really easy to listen to 
music nabbed off the Net. Frankel was an icon for script kiddies 
everywhere, and had a history of doing whatever he felt like doing -- but 
selling out to AOL? Even though the price tag was rumored to be $100 
million (and Nullsoft was also seeking relief from a troubling lawsuit 
that alleged that Winamp stole its code), many found this hard to swallow; 
even more suspected that AOL might not know exactly what it had gotten 
itself into.

For nine months, Frankel and his team worked in silence behind the 
corporate wall of AOL, in the company's San Francisco music headquarters. 
And then, one day in mid-March, the statement: a little program called 
Gnutella, hidden on a back page of Nullsoft's Web site. It was an early 
"alpha" version of what was to be an open-source (the code would be freely 
available to all) file-sharing system, like the increasingly controversial 
Napster program, but lacking the vulnerabilities -- centralized servers, 
lack of anonymity -- that made Napster so easy to attack.


What was Frankel thinking? AOL was in the process of merging with Time 
Warner, which in turn owns the EMI and Warner Music record labels. And EMI 
and Warner Music, as two of the five biggest members of the RIAA, are not 
fond of programs that allow users to pirate MP3 files. The program 
appeared on the Nullsoft Web site for just a few hours before AOL yanked 
the page down, issuing a terse statement declaring that "the Gnutella 
software was an unauthorized freelance project." Was Frankel trying to 
peeve his new corporate owners?

Nullsoft engineers had been watching the controversy surrounding Napster, 
and threw together Gnutella in the space of a few days as a way to prove 
that a decentralized system could out-geek the law. Their goal was less to 
annoy their new owners than to figure out how to improve upon Napster. As 
one person close to the Nullsoft staff explains, "They have 'fuck you 
money,' they can do whatever the hell they want and AOL can't take back 
what they gave them. I don't think that Gnutella was just done to [thumb 
their noses] -- AOL is insignificant. It was just the most interesting 
thing you could possibly be doing, AOL or no AOL."

AOL's punishment for its rogue programmers was minor: The company publicly 
disassociated itself from Gnutella, forbade Frankel to work on the program 
and hoped the embarrassment would end there. (Although Frankel, six months 
later, unleashed a second surprise for AOL: a little program called 
AIMazing, which helps eradicate ads from AOL's instant messaging program 
... but that's another story.)

AOL's actions did not mean, of course, the end of Gnutella. Avid 
developers were savvy enough to download Gnutella before it disappeared, 
and before long they had reverse-engineered the program and distributed 
the protocols; in a matter of weeks, the Web was peppered with sites 
offering both the original Gnutella program and a number of clones. Six 
months later, more than two dozen versions of the software have been 
released by assorted developers.

The initial Gnutella software was hard to use: It had a confusing 
interface, and to connect to the network users had to scramble to find the 
Internet address of another Gnutella host (not always an easy task). But 
new versions such as Gnotella incorporated friendly Napster-like 
interfaces, let users design their own skins and smoothed out some basic 
networking issues. Shaun Sidwall, the Canadian programmer behind Gnotella, 
plans to incorporate a built-in host in the next version of his software, 
so that newbies can automatically connect to the network.

Dozens of programmers were thrilled to get a chance to tinker with 
Gnutella. But any technology needs its figurehead, and with Frankel hidden 
away in the back rooms of AOL, Gnutella needed a new spokesperson. It 
found one in Kan.

Gnutella -- and, for that matter, the entire P2P movement -- couldn't ask 
for a better representative. Like Frankel, gonesilent.com founder Kan is a 
quiet and youthful programmer with a love for technology. Unlike Frankel, 
however, he's a master at industry diplomacy. He's young and soft-spoken 
and chooses his words as carefully as a law professor, excising any "ums" 
or "likes." He sits stiffly, with his hands in his lap, and other than his 
collection of zippy cars (including an RX7 and a BMW) is utterly lacking 
in ostentation.

Kan has done an excellent job as an evangelist: He's appeared in the pages 
of the New York Times debating industry heavyweights like RIAA president 
Hilary Rosen and antitrust attorney David Boies. He's flown to Washington 
to discuss policy with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and earlier this month 
attended a P2P summit organized by computer book publisher Tim O'Reilly. 
Thanks to all the free publicity, Gnutella's traffic has steadily grown: A 
recent study measured 35,000 users in a 24-hour period. Much of this 
growth came during the days after the RIAA won a preliminary injunction 
against Napster, as fans rushed to find a new program to use. (An appeals 
court later stayed the injunction until next week's hearings.) Kan 
estimates that roughly a million copies of the program were downloaded 
from his site that day. Today, on an average day, tens of thousands of 
users use Gnutella to exchange MP3 files, plus porn, pirated software 
"warez," illegal movies and other digital detritus, both pirated and 
legitimate.

But all the traffic has put a strain on Gnutella, and the program's 
weaknesses are starting to show. Kan, ever the upbeat evangelist for the 
technology, cheerfully admits that Gnutella has had its faults; but he 
also believes that Gnutella is ready for widespread use. "At first you 
focus on building the car, and once the car is built then you focus on 
refining the car," he enthuses. "We knew the refining was around the 
corner and it just takes some time. We wanted to accelerate the best we 
could by coordinating developer efforts and encouraging them to raise the 
bar on usability. And it happened."