John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet.

As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, 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.

He owns the domain toad.com. He runs the mail server at toad.com as an open mail relay, allowing friends who travel to send e-mail through his server. In March 2002, this was in the news since an Internet virus had that mail server hardcoded as one of the open mail relays it would use to propagate itself. In October 2002, John's ISP, Verio, cut off his Internet access because he refused to stop providing his service, even though John's relay was programmed to be essentially useless to spammersmers and other senders of mass email.

An outspoken libertarian, Gilmore has sued the FAA, Department of Justice, and others arguing the unconstitutionality of travel security policies.

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John Gilmore is also the name of a professional jazz trumpeter who performed with Sun Ra and his "Arkestra" for many years.


John Gilmore was also the name of a United States Representative from Pennsylvania.