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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:
- co-founder of the [[Electronic Frontier Foundation
- co-founder of [[Cygnus Solutions, a support company for free software, eventually bought by [[Red Hat
- helped start the alt.* [[Usenet hierarchy; John's system was the first to carry it
- helped start the cypherpunks; John's site hosted the original mailing list
- project leader for [[FreeSWAN | FreeS/WAN, a Linux implementation of [[IPsec and [[opportunistic encryption
- sponsor of the EFF [[Data_Encryption_Standard#DES.27s_Achilles.27_heel:_key_length|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
- wrote pdtar, which eventually became GNU tar
- primary maintainer of the [[GNU debugger for some years in the 90s
- various other free software projects, currently including [[GNU radio and the [[Gnash flash player
- work on drug policy reform
John maintains a web site with a number of things on it, including a personal home page. His toad.com may be the only personal domain listed among the 100 oldest .com domains.
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