Education
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
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Gene Kan
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Kan worked together with Spencer Kimball on the program called "gnubile" licensed under the GNU General Public License. the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF). In June 2000, he formed a distributed search engine known as InfraSearch.com. InfraSearch was purchased by Sun Microsystems on March 6, 2001 for $12.5M United States dollar in Sun stock options.
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 Chief Executive Officer Fred Ehrlich, and others also gave testimony at the hearing. On June 29, 2002, he committed suicide.
The cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head
Kan was 25 years old. Prior to taking his life, Kan updated an electronic copy of his resume hosted on a University of California, Berkeley server to read "Summary: Sad example of a human being. Specializing in failure." An independent documentary film was planned for Gene Kan after he died, but it never started production.
