> Von: Gnupg-users [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von
>
> Lessee...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard
> already give an end-of-life date for 2.0, but none for 1.4.
> And since Ubuntu 16.04 includes 1.4, there are likely
> to still be a few vocal 1.4 users out there.
>
> How about announcing an end-of-life date for 1.4 that
> is in the future (say, by 3 to 6 months)?
> ...

In my opinion, just "announcing" EOL (especially with such a short notice) is 
quite bad practice for products aiming to be used in production setups also. 
This quite negatively affects trust into the product as your costs may change 
quite rapidly. You might argue, that companies should be used to paying for 
things. They are, but they want to have some planning when they are expected to 
pay. Would you like your car manufacturer announce, that your car is not secure 
any more in 6 month and that you have to pay for non-standard maintenance, if 
you still want to operate it securely?

Apart from that: some companies using open source software are non-profit 
companies, like mine in research business. If our software strategy is bad - 
e.g. because upstream forces us suddenly to switch/pay, where we did not expect 
it - research funding money (mostly from the society) has to be used to keep 
the projects running.

So when talking about EOL, gpg community should consider writing down a 
consistent EOL strategy, similar to those of Ubuntu, Linux kernel or others or 
something like I tried to argue for in the middle of 
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2018-May/060539.html


As another poster already argued on boosting migration by pushing stronger for 
elliptic curve cryptography: This is very likely to motivate end users to 
migrate. For businesses it might be not so much: ECC within gpg is not yet 
approved for all kind of applications (no in-depth audit reports available 
yet), so RSA use will still be common for quite a time. Apart from that: due to 
the missing EOL strategy (see above) and the growing gpg complexity (and 
risks), for example we are currently experimenting using ECC without GPG for 
automation purposes (using the underlying crypto libraries more directly).

Maybe production use of gnupg might not be a priority for gnupg in future. This 
might free resources otherwise needed for thinking about a sensible 
EOL-strategy or migration pathes. On the other hand, you might also lose 
feedback from audit reports/pen-testing/bug reports, which is sometimes only 
available from production (how many end user can reliable capture a crash every 
10k hours of continued operation and distinguish it (with acceptable 
probabilities) from a hardware-related, hosting/virtualization infrastructure 
or silent kernel data corruption issue).


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