Leonard H. Tower Jr.

Leonard H. Tower Jr.
Len Tower wearing League for Programming Freedom and "No Smoking" badges (c. 1996)
Born (1949-06-17) June 17, 1949 (age 75)
New York City, U.S.
Alma materMIT
OccupationFree software activist
OrganizationsFree Software Foundation, League for Programming Freedom

Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. (born June 17, 1949) is a free software activist and one of the founding board members of the Free Software Foundation,[1] where he contributed to the initial releases of gcc[2] and GNU diff. He left the Free Software Foundation in 1997.[3]

  1. ^ Puzo, Jerome E., ed. (February 1986). "Gnu's Zoo". GNU's Bulletin. 1 (1). Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 2007-08-11. First ... there's Richard Stallman. ... Secondly there's Leonard H. Tower, Gnu's teddy bear. Len is Gnu's first and so far only paid full time employee. Gnu's Hawk, Robert Chassell ... [and] Professor Hal Abelson and Professor Geral Sussman ... round out FSF's board of Directors ... Although I have a portable C and Pascal compiler, ... most of the compiler is written in Pastel, ... so it must all be rewritten into C. Len Tower, the sole full-time GNU staff person, is working on this, with one or two assistants.
  2. ^ Stallman, Richard M. (24 April 1988), "Contributors to GNU CC" (PDF), Internals of GNU CC, Free Software Foundation, Inc., p. 7, archived from the original (PDF) on 2 April 2012, retrieved October 3, 2011, The idea of using RTL and some of the optimization ideas came from the U. of Arizona Portable Optimizer, written by Jack Davidson and Christopher Fraser. ... Leonard Tower wrote parts of the parser, RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of the Vax machine description.
  3. ^ Heuer, Karl, ed. (July 1997). "GNU's Who". GNU's Bulletin. 1 (23). Free Software Foundation, Inc. Retrieved October 9, 2011. Carol Botteron, Robert J. Chassell, Tami Friedman, Peter H. Salus, and Len Tower Jr. have left the FSF. Tami continues to volunteer for GNU as our Administrivia Coordinator. We thank them for their hard work.