I rarely visit the
gnupg.org page but today I visited since I am very interested in ECC with their modern 2.1 version. I noticed immediately that they are asking for some donations. I understand that some open source projects rely on donation support so developers can get paid for their time and dedication to their products.
It is very important that GNUPG continues their development as this is one of the main free sources of PGP. The developer was originally going to
quit development until the Snowden disclosures came along.
"Now, how viable is it to run a company for the development of free security software? Not very good I had to realize: the original plan of selling support contracts did not worked out too well due to the lack of resources for marketing. Larger development projects raised most of the revenues but they are not easy to acquire. In the last years we had problems to get new GnuPG related development contracts which turned the company into a one-person show by fall 2012. I actually planned to shut it down in 2013 and to take a straight coder job somewhere. However, as a side effect of Edward Snowden‘s brave actions, there was more public demand for privacy tools and thus I concluded that it is worth to keep on working on GnuPG. "
PGP is one of the few communication tools that
Nation States are having trouble cracking. It's important that Journalists, whistleblowers, activists, and people that live in hostile regime countries have a way communicate securely.
So please consider donating here:
https://www.gnupg.org/donate/index.html
Thanks.
