Dan Kohn

Dan Kohn (November 20, 1972 – November 1, 2020) was an American serial entrepreneur and nonprofit executive who led the Linux Foundation's Public Health initiative.^[1] He was the executive director at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which sustains and integrates open source cloud software including Kubernetes and Fluentd, through 2020.^[2][3] The first company he founded, NetMarket, conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994.^[4]

Dan Kohn
Kohn in 2016
Born	(1972-11-20)November 20, 1972 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	November 1, 2020(2020-11-01) (aged 47) New York City, New York, U.S.
Education	Phillips Exeter Academy
Alma mater	Swarthmore College (B.S.)
Known for	First secure commercial transaction on the web
Spouse	Julie Pullen
Children	2
Website	www.dankohn.com

Early life and education

Kohn was born in Philadelphia on November 20, 1972.^[5] He studied at Phillips Exeter Academy,^[6] and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1994.^[7]

Career

NetMarket

Kohn co-founded and was CEO of NetMarket, an online marketplace. On August 11, 1994, NetMarket sold Ten Summoner's Tales, a CD by Sting, to Phil Brandenberger of Philadelphia using a credit card over the Internet. The New York Times described this as "...the first retail transaction on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy." The encryption used in the transaction was provided by the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) program, incorporated into the X Mosaic browser.^[8][9]

Other work

Kohn worked as chief technology officer at Spreemo, a healthcare marketplace, and at Shopbeam, a shoppable ads startup. Earlier, he worked as vice president at Teledesic, the satellite-based Internet provider funded by Craig McCaw and Bill Gates^[10][11] and then became a general partner at Skymoon Ventures.^[6]

Kohn co-authored RFC 3023, XML Media Types, which defined how XML and MIME interoperate and is the origin of the widely used +suffix in MIME types.^[12] He also contributed two chapters to The Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning.^[13][14]

The Linux Foundation and CNCF

As executive director of CNCF, Kohn helped expand CNCF membership to include the largest public cloud and enterprise software companies.^[15] He led the efforts to create a conformance standard for Kubernetes and a Kubernetes certified service provider program in 2017.^[16][17] During Kohn's tenure at CNCF, he oversaw the growth of KubeCon (the foundation's primary event) from 500 attendees in 2015 to over 12,000 at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 in San Diego, California.^[18]

Kohn was chief operating officer of the Linux Foundation^[19] and helped launch the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative, a project created after Heartbleed to fund and support free and open-source software projects that are critical to the functioning of the Internet. More recently, he helped create their open source best practices badge.^[20][21]

As general manager of LF Public Health, Kohn helped "public health authorities use open source software to fight COVID-19 and other epidemics."^[22]

Personal life

Kohn was married to climate scientist Julie Pullen. Pullen and Kohn had two sons.^[23]

Death

Kohn died of complications from colon cancer in New York City on November 1, 2020, at age 47.^[24]

References

1. . TechCrunch. June 2020. Archived from the original on January 24, 2022. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
2. "CNCF Names Kohn as Executive Director". Light Reading. June 3, 2016. from the original on November 10, 2016. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
3. Darrow, Barb (August 9, 2017). "Amazon Joins Google, Goldman Sachs, and Twitter in This Cloud Foundation". Fortune. from the original on October 23, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
4. Gilbert, Alorie. "E-commerce turns 10". CNET. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
5. "Daniel KOHN Obituary - New York, NY". Dignity Memorial. Retrieved November 3, 2020.
6. "Dan Kohn". LinkedIn. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
7. Behrens, Eric (December 16, 2009). "www.SWARTHMORE.edu". Swarthmore College. from the original on October 22, 2017. Retrieved November 3, 2020.
8. Lewis, Peter H. (August 12, 1994). "Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open". New York Times. from the original on September 3, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
9. Grothaus, Michael (November 26, 2015). "You'll Never Guess What the First Thing Ever Sold on the Internet Was". Fast Company. from the original on February 15, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
10. Brzezinski, Matthew (February 20, 1997). "Teledesic's 'Internet in the Sky' May Use Soviet-Made Missiles". Wall Street Journal. from the original on December 29, 2017. Retrieved December 30, 2015.
11. Kohn, Daniel M. (November 1997). "Providing global broadband Internet access using low-earth-orbit satellites". Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 29 (15): 1763–1768. doi:10.1016/S0169-7552(97)00108-6. ISSN 0169-7552.
12. Murata, M.; St, S.; Kohn, D. (January 2001). "XML Media Types, RFC 3023". Internet Engineering Task Force. doi:10.17487/RFC3023. from the original on December 15, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
13. Larimore, Taylor; Lindauer, Mel, eds. (February 22, 2011). The Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning. Wiley. ISBN 978-0470919019.
14. "Bogleheads' Guide to Retirement Planning". Bogleheads Wiki. from the original on August 14, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
15. Krazit, Tom (December 6, 2017). "Alibaba, Baidu step up support for cloud-native tech as CloudNativeCon kicks off". GeekWire. from the original on December 7, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
16. Miller, Ron (November 13, 2017). "36 companies agree to a Kubernetes certification standard". TechCrunch. from the original on December 23, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
17. Meyer, Dan (September 11, 2017). "CNCF Looks to Bridge Gap in Kubernetes Skills and Support". SDxCentral. from the original on December 29, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
18. "Predictions 2020: Infrastructure and Ops Trends to Watch in 2020". DevOps.com. December 24, 2019. Retrieved January 22, 2020.
19. Lohr, Steve; O'Brien, Kevin J. (October 23, 2007). "Microsoft Is Yielding in European Antitrust Fight". New York Times. from the original on June 5, 2015. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
20. Bhartiya, Swapnil (May 3, 2016). "CII's Best Practices badge program is making open source projects more secure". CIO. from the original on July 14, 2016. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
21. "Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge". Github. from the original on April 9, 2017. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
22. . TechCrunch. June 2020. Archived from the original on January 24, 2022. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
23. "Dr. Julie Pullen". Dr. Julie Pullen. Retrieved November 3, 2020.
24. "An Open Source Leader Is Gone, a Remembrance of Dan Kohn". The New Stack. November 2, 2020. Retrieved November 2, 2020.

External links

• Video about the first web transaction, by Shopify, 4 minutes, 10 seconds