John Gilmore (advocate)
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:John-gilmore.2001.small.png John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project.
As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems and founder of Cygnus Support, he accumulated sufficient wealth to take an early retirement and pursue other interests. He is a frequent contributor to free software, and worked on several GNU projects, including maintaining the GNU Debugger in the early 90s, initiating the GNU Radio project in 1998, and the Gnash project in December 2005 to create a free software player for Shockwave Flash movies. Outside of the GNU project he founded the FreeS/WAN project, an implementation of IPsec, to promote the encryption of Internet traffic.
He owns the domain toad.com. He runs the mail server at toad.com as an open mail relay, allowing friends who travel to send e-mail through his server. In March 2002, this was in the news since an Internet virus had that mail server hardcoded as one of the open mail relays it would use to propagate itself. In October 2002, John's ISP, Verio, cut off his Internet access because he refused to stop providing his service, even though John's relay was programmed to be essentially useless to spammers and other senders of mass email.
An outspoken libertarian, Gilmore has sued the FAA, Department of Justice, and others. He argued the unconstitutionality of secret law regarding travel security policies.
John is also a philanthropist, and has given financial support to various organizations seeking to end the war on drugs.