John Gilmore (born 1955) is an American activist. He is one of the founders of the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the ''alt.*'' hierarchy in

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

and is a major contributor to the

GNU Project The GNU Project ( ) is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing dev ...

. An outspoken civil libertarian, Gilmore has sued the

Federal Aviation Administration The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is a Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government agency within the United States Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Transportation that regulates civil aviation in t ...

, the

United States Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a United States federal executive departments, federal executive department of the U.S. government that oversees the domestic enforcement of Law of the Unite ...

, and others. He was the plaintiff in the prominent case '' Gilmore v. Gonzales'', challenging secret travel-restriction laws, which he lost. He is an advocate for drug policy reform. He co-authored the

Bootstrap Protocol The Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) is a computer networking protocol used in Internet Protocol networks to automatically assign an IP address to network devices from a configuration server. The BOOTP was originally defined in published in 1985. Whi ...

in 1985, which evolved into

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network protocol, network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the netw ...

(DHCP), the primary way local networks assign an

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

to devices.

Life and career

As the fifth employee of

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

and founder of Cygnus Support, he became wealthy enough to retire early and pursue other interests. He is also one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

. He is a frequent contributor to

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

, and worked on several GNU projects, including maintaining the

GNU Debugger The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, Assembly, C, C++, D, Fortran, Haskell, Go, Objective-C, OpenCL C, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust, and par ...

in the early 1990s, initiating GNU Radio in 1998, starting Gnash media player in December 2005 to create a free software player for Flash movies, and writing the pdtar program which became GNU tar. Outside of the GNU project he founded the FreeS/WAN project, an implementation of IPsec, to promote the encryption of Internet traffic. He sponsored the EFF's Deep Crack DES cracker, sponsored the Micropolis city building game based on SimCity, and is a proponent of

opportunistic encryption Opportunistic encryption (OE) refers to any system that, when connecting to another system, attempts to encrypt communications channels, otherwise falling back to unencrypted communications. This method requires no pre-arrangement between the two ...

. Gilmore co-authored the

with Bill Croft in 1985. The Bootstrap Protocol evolved into DHCP, the method by which Ethernet and wireless networks typically assign devices an

. On October 22, 2021, EFF announced that they had removed Gilmore from the Board following a governance dispute. The details of the dispute were not made public. On June 23, 2024, Gilmore was selected as a board member of the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

Activism

Gilmore owns the

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

toad.com, which is one of the 100 oldest active .com domains. It was registered on August 18, 1987. He runs the mail server at toad.com as an

open mail relay An open mail relay is a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server configured in such a way that it allows anyone on the Internet to send e-mail through it, not just mail destined to or originating from known users. This used to be the default ...

. In October 2002, Gilmore's ISP,

Verio Verio is a global web hosting provider headquartered in the United States. Incorporated in 1996 in Denver, Colorado, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Communications, which acquired the company in 2000. Ve ...

, cut off his Internet access for running an open relay, a violation of Verio's terms of service. Many people contend that open relays make it too easy to send spam. Gilmore protests that his mail server was programmed to be essentially useless to spammers and other senders of mass email and he argues that Verio's actions constitute censorship. He also notes that his configuration makes it easier for friends who travel to send email, although his critics counter that there are other mechanisms to accommodate people wanting to send email while traveling. The measures Gilmore took to make his server useless to spammers may or may not have helped, considering that in 2002, at least one mass-mailing worm that propagated through open relays — W32.Yaha — had been hard-coded to relay through the toad.com mail server. Gilmore famously stated of Internet censorship that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". He unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of secret regulations regarding travel security policies in '' Gilmore v. Gonzales''. Gilmore is also an advocate for the relaxing of drug laws and has given financial support to Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Marijuana Policy Project, Erowid,

MAPS A map is a symbolic depiction of interrelationships, commonly spatial, between things within a space. A map may be annotated with text and graphics. Like any graphic, a map may be fixed to paper or other durable media, or may be displayed on ...

, Flex Your Rights, and various other organizations seeking to end the war on drugs. He is a member of the boards of directors of MAPS and the Marijuana Policy Project. Until October 2021, he was also a board member of the EFF.

Affiliations

Following the sale of AMPRNet address space in mid-2019, Gilmore, under amateur radio call sign W0GNU, was listed as a board member of Amateur Radio Digital Communications, a non-profit involved in the management of the resources on behalf of the

amateur radio Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of the radio frequency radio spectrum, spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emer ...

community.

Honours

Gilmore has received the

's Advancement of Free Software 2009 award.

References

External links

*
Gilmore v. Gonzales information

* ttp://grep.law.harvard.edu/features/04/08/18/112237.shtml John Gilmore on inflight activism, spam and sarongs interview by Mikael Pawlo, August 18, 2004.
Gilmore on Secret Laws / Gonzales case
audio interview, November 13, 2006. {{DEFAULTSORT:Gilmore, John Living people American drug policy reform activists Free software programmers Web developers Computer programmers Cypherpunks GNU people Internet activists 1955 births American technology company founders American philanthropists People from York, Pennsylvania Amateur radio people Internet pioneers