John Gilmore

John Gilmore

Biographie

These days I call myself an entrepreneur, which means I start things. Some things I have been involved in starting were the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Sun Microsystems, the "alt" newsgroups, the Cypherpunks, The Little Garden ISP, and Cygnus Support (now Cygnus Solutions). I'm currently inspiring the creation of free software for automatic packet encryption using IETF's IPSEC, and working on securing the Domain Name System. I'm also advising and cheerleading an EFF lawsuit designed to eliminate the export controls on cryptographic software.

I've also spent most of my life programming. I wrote pdtar (now GNU Tar) and GNU UUCP from scratch. I was hardware/software interface guy for Sun; wrote boot ROMs, debugged hardware, and maintained Sun sendmail. I wrote commercial mainframe email software in 1973, and maintained GDB and Kerberos for several years.

I've served on the Boards of EFF, Cygnus, and the Sun User Group.