John Gilmore (activist)

John Gilmore (born 1955) is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU Project.

An outspoken civil libertarian, Gilmore has sued the Federal Aviation Administration, the United States Department of Justice, and others. He was the plaintiff in the prominent case Gilmore v. Gonzales, challenging secret travel-restriction laws, which he lost. He is an advocate for drug policy reform.

He co-authored the Bootstrap Protocol in 1985, which evolved into Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), the primary way local networks assign an IP address to devices.