Hi, last week I basically finished the new infrastructure for www.gnupg.org <http://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gnupg-doc.git> and posted a new blog entry which you find below in plain text. If anyone has an interesting thing to say about GnuPG and related topics, drop me a note and we can publish it there. The blog part of the site has no comment functions because I find it easier to have discussions by mail.
Salam-Shalom, Werner ==== <https://gnupg.org/blog/20141214-gnupg-and-g10.html> After the release of GnuPG 1.0 in 1999 it turned out that this was not a write once and forget project. The unrestricted availability of the software and public concerns about the acquirement of /PGP Inc./ by /NAI Inc./ (coincidentally at the time of the initial GnuPG release in December 1997) raised a lot of interest by those who always cared about privacy issues. Fortunately the funding of the Windows port by the German Ministry of Economics helped to finance the maintenance and further developments in 1999 and 2000. After that I decided to keep on working on GnuPG full time and founded [g10^code GmbH] in 2001 as a legal framework for it. The company is owned entirely by my brother [Walter] and myself and I like to thank him for his long time support and waive of profit distribution. If you ever wondered about the name: /g10/ is a reference on the German constitution article on freedom of communication (Grundgesetz [Artikel 10]) and a pun on the [G-10] law which allows the secret services to bypass these constitutional guaranteed freedoms. The best known project of g10^code is probably version 2 of GnuPG, which started under the name /NewPG/ as part of the broader /Aegypten/ project. The main goal of Aegypten was to provide support for S/MIME under GNU/Linux and integrate that cleanly with other mail clients, most notably KMail. This project was due to a public tender of the [BSI] (German federal office for information security) and awarded to a consortium of g10^code, [Intevation], and [KDAB]. Another large project is [Gpg4win] which has its roots in a port of GnuPG-2 to Windows done by g10^code as part of a health research project. Another tender awarded to the same consortium extended this port to the now mostly used GnuPG distribution for Windows. 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. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ year profit wages n balance ───────────────────────────────── 2001 -12000 11000 2 31000 2002 3000 40000 3 32000 2003 -16000 26000 3 35000 2004 3000 45000 4 52000 2005 0 44000 4 56000 2006 2000 48000 3 49000 2007 50000 57000 2 99000 2008 11000 75000 3 94000 2009 -23000 72000 3 68000 2010 28000 74000 2 78000 2011 -41000 63000 2 81000 2012 -16000 54000 2 45000 2013 -10000 32000 1 44000 2014 12000 32000 1 47000 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The table above is a summary of g10^{code}’s balance sheets (in Euro, 2014 are estimations). /profit/ gives the annual net profit or loss, /wages/ are the gross salary costs for the /n/ employed developers, and /balance/ is the balance sheet total. Despite of our low wages we accumulated an estimated loss of 9000 Euro over the last 3 years. The crowdfunding campaign last year proved that there are many people who like to see GnuPG alive and maintained. Despite the huge [costs] of the campaign it allowed me to keep working on GnuPG and I am confident that there will be ways to continue work in 2015. [g10^code GmbH] https://g10code.com [Walter] http://www.u32.de [Artikel 10] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artikel_10_des_Grundgesetzes_f%C3%BCr_die_Bundesrepublik_Deutschland [G-10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetz_zur_Beschr%C3%A4nkung_des_Brief-,_Post-_und_Fernmeldegeheimnisses [BSI] http://www.bsi.de/EN/ [Intevation] https://intevation.de/index.en.html [KDAB] https://kdab.com [Gpg4win] http://www.gpg4win.org [costs] file:20140512-rewards-sent.org -- Die Gedanken sind frei. Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
