Free Software and Other Projects
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 GNU Radio in 1998, starting Gnash 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, the Micropolis city building game based on SimCity, and he is a proponent of opportunistic encryption.
Gilmore is co-author with Bill Croft of the 1985 Bootstrap Protocol (RFC 951), which evolved into DHCP, the primary way to obtain an IP address upon joining an Ethernet or wireless network.
Gilmore has received the Free Software Foundation's Advancement of Free Software 2009 award.
Read more about this topic: John Gilmore (activist)
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