In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley, Spencer Kimball and his classmate Peter Mattis developed the first version of the open source image editing program, The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) as a class project. The two were also members of a student club at Berkeley called the eXperimental Computer Facility (XCF)[1].
Kimball said in 1999 that, "From the first line of source code to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' paid to the free software movement. After using emacs, gcc, Linux, etc., I really felt that I owed a debt to the community which had, to a large degree, shaped my computing development." (Stig Hackvän, Interview with Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, Linux World, January, 1999[2])
Having graduated from Berkeley in 1997, 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 the file-sharing program Gnutella, including development of a Unix/Linux client. In 2000, he created a web-based version of GIMP, OnlinePhotoLab.com, that was short-lived.
