Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. (born June 17, 1949) is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

activist Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fro ...

and one of the founding board members of the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

, where he contributed to the initial releases of gcc and GNU

diff In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but it ...

. He left the Free Software Foundation in 1997.

Birth

Tower was born June 17, 1949 in

Astoria, Queens Astoria is a neighborhood in the western portion of the New York City borough of Queens. Astoria is bounded by the East River and is adjacent to three other Queens neighborhoods: Long Island City to the southwest, Sunnyside to the southeast ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

Academic career

In 1971, Tower received an SB in biology from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. During that time he was Business Manager at '' The Tech'', the student newspaper.

GNU project

As the FSF's first full-time paid employee, Tower mostly performed administrative tasks including managing mailing lists, newsgroups and requests for information. In 1986, Tower assisted

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

with Stallman's initial plan to base the C compiler for the GNU Project on the

Pastel A pastel () is an art medium in a variety of forms including a stick, a square a pebble or a pan of color; though other forms are possible; they consist of powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are similar to those use ...

compiler Stallman had obtained from Lawrence Livermore Lab. Tower worked on rewriting the existing code from Pastel, a variation of

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...

, into C while Stallman worked on building the new C front end. Stallman dropped that plan when he discovered the Livermore compiler required too much memory, concluding, "I would have to write a new compiler from scratch. That new compiler is now known as GCC; none of the Pastel compiler is used in it, but I managed to adapt and use the C front end that I had written." Stallman released his new GNU C compiler March 22, 1987, acknowledging others' contributions, including Tower's, who "wrote parts of the parser, RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of the Vax machine description" based on ideas contributed by Jack Davidson and Christopher Fraser. Along with Mike Haertel, David Hayes and Stallman, Tower was also one of the initial co-authors of GNU

, a file comparison utility based on a published algorithm by

Eugene Myers Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. Education Myers receiv ...

. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tower spoke at USENIX conferences as a representative of the FSF.

League for Programming Freedom

Tower was an early member of the

League for Programming Freedom League for Programming Freedom (LPF) was founded in 1989 by Richard Stallman to unite free software developers as well as developers of proprietary software to fight against software patents and the extension of the scope of copyright. Their logo ...

. Through 1991, Tower was one of the organization's two most active speakers, along with

References

External links

Studio pages
at Art.Net
Website
at the

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tower, Leonard H. Jr. GNU people Free software programmers Free Software Foundation Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Brentwood High School (Brentwood, New York) alumni People from Queens, New York 1949 births Living people Activists from New York (state)