It would seem my previous message was only part of the story.
I've done some digging since sending the last message, and while the
post was accurate (as far as it goes) it wasn't the whole story.
Pgp was indeed released as freeware initially.
It then (after some legal rangling took place) appears that Phil
Zimmerman setup his own company for distribution of pgp. His company
apparently went through a couple phases, including one stint of the
pgp product being produced by MIT. Then NAI, which for a time
stopped releasing source to the product.
This apparently made a lot of folks unhappy, since they wanted source
to make themselves secure in the knowledge that there were no
backdoors in the pgp code. Finally, it seems the decision was made
to go ahead and release source again, but shortly afterwords, the
company shut down their pgp operations. It's at that point that Phil
Zimmerman took control again, developed it for his own company, and
until 2010, distributed both binary and source versions of the product.
In 2010, Symantec bought www.pgp.net, and the pgp company too.
There's no mention on the site where Phil swrites about all this
whether or not he's still involved with the product, but I'd have to
guess he is is some way.
Whether or not the symantec version of the product reverts to a
freeware version after the trial period expires or not I can't say,
and I'm in no mood to fill out an account signup form, then make the
request on symantec's site to find out, but if anyone else decides to
do so, please let us know how it works out.
You can still download the 2.63 international version at the
following url:
http://www.pgpi.org/cgi/download.cgi?filename=pgp263is.tar.gz
This will download the source directly, with no links to be clicked
on to start the download, other than the server you wish to download
from. (I suggest using the main site from norway, though others
probably work just fine)
This will give you the entire source code of the 2.63 release, which
(from my extremely short digging session) leads me to believe is the
last version before it was picked up by commercial interests, and
turned into the full blown products we see today from symantec and
others.
There are binaries on the site as well, but I don't know if the mac
binaries are for osx, or classic mac versions, I didn't try them
since I much prefer to compile from source when available, which, in
this case, they were. :))
I need to fire up my intel-based mini to do the compile, or translate
the assembly language calls into ppc ones so they'll work on this g4
mini I'm using at the moment, to get a clean compile, but for the
moment, I'm assuming an intel-based mac under osx will have no issues
compiling the source if the make freebsd command is used on the src
folder after extraction.
I understand there are osx versions of pgp available both from
symantec, and from www.pgp.com before it got taken over by Symantec,
though I've made no effort to locate these binaries, since I'm more
interested in the version I have already. :)
There isn't any issue with the rsa algorithms used in the pgp
program, since that patent passed into the public domain in 2000,
but depending on who you ask, the idea algorithm is either clear to
use (as of may 2011) or not available (in the us) until Jan of 2012),
so you may or may not want to use that one, but compiling seems to be
a straightforward process with the 2.63I source version linked to above.
It's a terminal app though, so I'd wager most here wouldn't be
interested in that as a whole, but for those that are, compiling on
intel-based macs shouldn't present any major obsticles.
This probably confused more than it helped, but I hope it did some
good overall.
So, to summarize.
pgp is a Symantec product (at the moment), if you want the latest and
greatest version.
However, older versions can be had for free online, and can be
compiled to produce an executable that should work for you regardless
of your operating system.
hth.
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