Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. (born June 17, 1949) is a

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 ...

activist Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived common good. Forms of activism range from mandate build ...

and one of the founding board members 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 ...

, where he contributed to the initial releases of gcc and GNU

diff In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but i ...

. He left the Free Software Foundation in 1997.

Birth

Tower was born June 17, 1949, in

Astoria, Queens Astoria is a neighborhood in the western portion of the New York City Boroughs of New York City, borough of Queens. Astoria is bounded by the East River and is adjacent to four other Queens neighborhoods: Long Island City, Queens, Long Island C ...

, in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

Academic career

In 1971, Tower received an SB in biology from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. During that time, he was business manager at '' The Tech'', the student newspaper.

GNU project

As the FSF's first full-time paid employee, Tower mostly performed administrative tasks, including managing mailing lists, newsgroups and requests for information. In 1986, Tower assisted

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

with Stallman's initial plan to base the C compiler for the GNU Project on the

Pastel A pastel () is an art medium that consists of powdered pigment and a binder (material), binder. It can exist in a variety of forms, including a stick, a square, a pebble, and a pan of color, among other forms. The pigments used in pastels are ...

compiler Stallman had obtained from Lawrence Livermore Lab. Tower worked on rewriting the existing code from Pastel, a variation of Pascal, into C while Stallman worked on building the new C front end. Stallman dropped that plan when he discovered the Livermore compiler required too much memory, concluding, "I would have to write a new compiler from scratch. That new compiler is now known as GCC; none of the Pastel compiler is used in it, but I managed to adapt and use the C front end that I had written." Stallman released his new GNU C compiler March 22, 1987, acknowledging others' contributions, including Tower's, who "wrote parts of the parser, RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of the Vax machine description" based on ideas contributed by Jack Davidson and Christopher Fraser. Along with Mike Haertel, David Hayes and Stallman, Tower was also one of the initial co-authors of GNU

, a file comparison utility based on a published algorithm by Eugene Myers. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tower spoke at

USENIX USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

conferences as a representative of the FSF.

League for Programming Freedom

Tower was an early member of the League for Programming Freedom. Through 1991, Tower was one of the organization's two most active speakers, along with

References

External links

Studio pages
at Art.Net
Website
at the

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tower, Leonard H. Jr. GNU people Free software programmers Free Software Foundation Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Brentwood High School (Brentwood, New York) alumni Activists from Queens, New York 1949 births Living people Activists from New York (state)