John Gilmore: Things I've Started

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (with Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and Steve Wozniak)

A foundation dedicated to civil rights and civic responsibilities online. Here's a few documents I made with EFF. Here is a speech on Privacy, Technology and the Open Society that I gave at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy. I'm still quite active in EFF, and serve on its Board of Directors.

The Cypherpunks (with Eric Hughes and Tim May)

An informal group dedicated to public education and dissemination of encryption (also known as cryptography, the science and art of secret writing). I originally hosted the mailing list (cypherpunks@toad.com) and provided space for the first few years' worth of meetings. A descendant of the mailing list is still operating; subscribe to cryptography@metzdowd.com.

The ``alt'' newsgroups on the Usenet (with Brian Reid and Gordon Moffett)

A forum for discussions that the ``mainstream'' Usenet refused to handle, like sex, drugs, and gourmet cooking. I supported nationwide (US) links among the original ``alt'' sites until it became popular enough that almost everyone carried it. I set the original newsgroup creation policy in ``alt'', which was to ``Use common sense.'' Alt has flourished as a haven for popular and unpopular topics, and was targeted by Compuserve for censorship in December 1995 because they felt that some of the free speech in it was too free for them to handle. The alt groups are self-regulating (or self-unregulating) and I have not been involved in alt policy or group creation in many years.

Cygnus Solutions (with Mike Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace)

A company that provides commercial support for free software. They support the GNU programming software (from the Free Software Foundation), I co-managed the company, provided engineering leadership, was the official maintainer of GDB for several years and led the GDB programming team, supported numerous customers, and led the Cygnus Network Security (Kerberos) product team. I instituted a culture of distributed hiring, automated software testing, and frequent software releases across scores of platforms, much of which persists to this day. I stopped working daily at Cygnus in April 1995, and left the Board of Directors in January, 1997. The company was bought by Red Hat, Inc in November, 1999, for $675 million. They're still doing fine as a big piece of Red Hat.

I've scanned in some Cygnus marketing materials showing some of the early evolution of the free software market.

The Little Garden (with John Romkey, David Henkel-Wallace, and Steve Crocker)

A medium-sized Internet Service Provider in the San Francisco Bay Area. now merged into Verio. We mostly sold T1 and 56K Internet connections to businesses. We were distinguished from many other early commercial providers by our common-carrier attitude: "You are free to resell the service that we provide to you, and we will not censor it." This enabled a whole crop of smaller resellers in various locales to buy from us and offer other services to the public (like modem-based Internet connections). These resellers contributed to our volume of Internet traffic, and enabled us to provide higher quality service at lower prices. TLGnet was sold to Best Internet Communications in July, 1996, and my active involvement in it ended. (Best was then bought by Hiway Technologies, which was then bought by Verio.)

GNU Radio (with Eric Blossom)

A software project that decodes and encodes radio and audio signals in software. It's a specific example of "Digital Signal Processing", but designed to be good at handling high speed (or wideband) signals. It's free software.

GNU Radio can receive and decode over-the-air HDTV signals in the US standard "ATSC" format. This decoder enables researchers to demonstrate a full software implementation of the ATSC format, and also provides a reference implementation for other designers. The decoder software currently (May 2003) runs about 40x slower than realtime, but enables the realtime recording, slow decoding, and later full-speed playback of HDTV signals. I have verified that the software works, on my own equipment. Here are example images #1 and #2 decoded on May 13, 2003 from KQED-DT, channel 30 in San Francisco, California.

Gnash, the GNU Flash player (with Rob Savoye)

No working free software or open source flash player existed to display the average web page that contains embedded Macromedia Flash objects. Richard Stallman therefore made such a player a high priority project for the Free Software Foundation.

I knew Rob Savoye from Cygnus, and knew he'd done some work on an embedded Flash player, so I asked if I could pay him for six months to turn that open source embedded Flash player into a GNU flash player. He agreed, and the Gnash project was born. It currently provides a standalone player which builds and runs on a variety of systems, using OpenGL and other renderers, plus a browser plugin. The project is now financially supported by a commercial company, Lulu.com, which stands to benefit from its rapid evolution. It is now able to play Flash videos from YouTube and Lulu.tv. Stay tuned; a solid community of contributors are improving it daily.