Leonard H. Tower, Jr.

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, where he contributed to the initial releases of gcc and GNU diff. He left the Free Software Foundation in 1997.

Birth Tower was born June 17, 1949, in Astoria, Queens, in New York City, U.S.

Academic career In 1971, Tower received an SB in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 with Stallman's initial plan to base the C compiler for the GNU Project on the Pastel compiler Stallman had obtained from Lawrence Livermore Lab. Tower worked on rewriting the existing code from Pastel, a variation of Pascal, into C 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 diff, a file comparison utility based on a published algorithm by Eugene Myers.

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