John Gilmore

John Gilmore is probably best known as an activist for freedom of speech on the net, as one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation or EFF [1].

He was Sun Microsystems' employee number five, the first person hired after the company founders. At Sun, he worked on both hardware and software, wrote the Forth-based bootstrap ROM code and co-authored RFC 951 defining bootp, which eventually evolved into DHCP. He was also involved in free software, porting GNU Emacs and other programs to the Sun environment. His time at Sun made John a millionaire, leaving him free to pursue other interests.

Among his projects since leaving Sun:

• co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• co-founder of Cygnus Solutions, a support company for free software, eventually bought by Red Hat
• project leader for FreeS/WAN, a Linux implementation of IPsec and opportunistic encryption
• sponsor of the EFF DES Cracker project
• campaign to boycott the US census, since government has historically mis-used information
• two lawsuits against US government for demanding ID to travel, which John says is unconstitutional, Gilmore v. Ashcroft & Gilmore v. Gonzales
• various free software projects, currently including GNU radio and the Gnash flash player

John's maintains a web site with a number of things on it, including a personal home page.