- Spencer Kimball
Spencer Kimball is a
computer programmer most notable for his early work on theGNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley, Kimball and his classmate Peter Mattis developed the first version of The GIMP as a class project. The two were also members of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computer Facility (XCF). [cite web|url=http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2000/12/04/xcf/index.html |title=Free Photoshop for the people |accessdate=2006-08-28 |last=Frauenheim |first=Ed |date=2000-12-04 |publisher=Salon.com]
Kimball said in 1999 that, "From the first line of
source code to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' paid to thefree software movement . After usingemacs , gcc,Linux , etc., I really felt that I owed a debt to the community which had, to a large degree, shaped my computing development." [cite web|url=http://web.archive.org/web/19990417052141/http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-01/lw-01-gimp.html|title=Interview with Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis |accessdate=2007-08-30|author= |last=Hackvän |first=Stig |year=1999 |month=January |publisher=LinuxWorld ]Kimball graduated with a B.A. in computer science from Berkeley in 1996, and stayed for a year in the Masters program under Eric Brewer. Kimball left college for work, and mostly ended his relationship with the GIMP development community. He co-founded WeGo, a company providing tools for building web communities, in 1998 and served as the company's Chief Architect. While at XCF, he met
Gene Kan , who was also a member, and the two would later begin working together on a file-sharing program for theGnutella network, the open source Unix/Linux client "gnubile". In 2000, he created a web-based version of GIMP, OnlinePhotoLab.com, that was short-lived. The technology was subsequently folded intoOfoto 's online image manipulation tools. He started work with Google in Mountain View in 2002 and relocated to Google's New York offices in 2004.Spencer is named for his great-grandfather, LDS Church President
Spencer W. Kimball .References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
