Technology

Man knows not his time

Gene Kan pioneered a file-sharing system considered a step beyond Napster. So why did such a talented guy kill himself? Authorities found the 25-year-old programmer dead at his home near San Francisco; they reported an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Techies mourned him as a genius whose work helped take Internet technology beyond the dot-com crash. "Gene was really good at communicating the technical merits of the peer-to-peer approach," said tech author Cory Doctorow, referring to the system of user-to-user Internet file sharing that eliminates the need for a central computer server. He had noticed that Mr. Kan seemed depressed recently and described him as "dour." Mr. Kan's discovery was called the Gnutella protocol. When Napster was shut down by the courts, Gnutella became a hot commodity—and he was its unofficial spokesman. Since Gnutella was completely decentralized, no one controlled the network. Therefore, no single lawsuit could shut everything down. "There is no head to the Gnutella dragon," Mr. Kan said in 2000. The developer admitted that illegal files circulate on the network, but brushed the issue aside: "How users make use of it, I hate to say it's not our problem, but it really isn't." With his unexplained death, he may be remembered more for his suicide than his technology. —Chris Stamper