| metaschima |
02-05-2015 03:30 PM |
Please help GNUPG stay alive
Quote:
Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.
"I'm too idealistic," he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. "In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job." But then the Snowden news broke, and "I realized this was not the time to cancel."
...
But after the Snowden news broke, Koch decided to launch a fundraising campaign. He set up an appeal at a crowdsourcing website, made t-shirts and stickers to give to donors, and advertised it on his website. In the end, he earned just $21,000.
The campaign gave Koch, who has an 8-year-old daughter and a wife who isn't working, some breathing room. But when I asked him what he will do when the current batch of money runs out, he shrugged and said he prefers not to think about it. "I'm very glad that there is money for the next three months," Koch said. "Really I am better at programming than this business stuff."
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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ng-broke.shtml
You can check the main site to see how much of it has been funded.
https://gnupg.org/
As you probably already know gnupg and libgcrypt are FLOSS crypto software used by millions, and some of the best crypto software for Linux. More recently they have also added elliptic curve cryptography support, which AFAIK is not provided by any other FLOSS project. Gnupg is also the standard for digital signatures on multiple platforms. libgcrypt is a secure high performance crypto library that is far underused IMO (compared to openssl). I also notice that libgcrypt code has been the foundation of the Linux kernel crypto API.
If you cannot contribute money, then contribute code and bug fixes. |
