Spencer Kimball is a computer programmer most notable for his early work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).

In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, Kimball and his classmate Peter Mattis

Peter Mattis

Peter Mattis is a computer programmer most notable for his early work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program .In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley, Mattis and his classmate Spencer Kimball developed the first version of The GIMP as a class project...

 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).

Kimball said in 1999 that, "From the first line of source code

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

 to the last, GIMP was always my 'dues' paid to the free software movement

Free software movement

The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...

. After using emacs

Emacs

Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...

, gcc

GNU Compiler Collection

The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain...

, Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, etc., I really felt that I owed a debt to the community which had, to a large degree, shaped my computing development."

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

Eric Brewer (computer scientist)

Eric A. Brewer is the main inventor of a wireless networking scheme called WiLDNet which promises to bring low-cost connectivity to rural areas of the developing world. He was made a tenured professor at UC Berkeley at the age of 32. In 1996, Brewer co-founded Inktomi Corporation. He is known for...

. 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

Gene Kan

Gene Kan was a British-born Chinese American peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer who was among the first programmers to produce an open-source version of the file-sharing application that implemented the Gnutella protocol. Kan worked together with Spencer Kimball on the program called "gnubile"...

, who was also a member, and the two would later begin working together on a file-sharing program for the Gnutella

Gnutella

Gnutella is a large peer-to-peer network which, at the time of its creation, was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model...

 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 into Ofoto'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

Spencer W. Kimball

Spencer Woolley Kimball was the twelfth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1973 until his death in 1985.-Ancestry:...

.

He has worked on Google Servlet Engine along with Peter Mattis

Peter Mattis

Peter Mattis is a computer programmer most notable for his early work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program .In 1995, while students at the University of California at Berkeley, Mattis and his classmate Spencer Kimball developed the first version of The GIMP as a class project...

.