John Gilmore is a philanthropist, computer engineer, entrepreneur, civil libertarian, and drug policy reformer. He has thirty years of experience in the computer industry, including applications programming, systems programming, language implementation, management, and investment. He was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a cypherpunk privacy activist. He co-designed the protocol that your phone or laptop uses daily to get its Internet address. He also contributed decades and more than $12 million to improving United States drug laws.
He cofounded Cygnus Support, the successful commercial free software company that polished and supported GCC, Binutils, and GDB; invested tens of millions of revenue dollars into engineers improving GNU tools; and is now part of IBM. Gilmore also wrote, maintained, or improved many free software programs. He wrote the program that became GNU Tar, was GDB maintainer for years, improved the GNU Binutils and the GNU manuals, and catalyzed and funded GNU Radio and Gnash.
