On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 12:46 -0600, Steven Alligood wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> whereas PGP sprung up from the > >> open source community to encrypt stuff, and was later added into email > >> as a nifty way to handle email encryption. > >> > > > > Erm, that's not the way I remember it. PGP is commercial software > > developed by Phil Zimmerman. GPG came along much later. > > > > Barry Roberts > > > > > > You are right; I misrepresented that. > > PGP was not "open source" although the source code was available to > download and compile, use, etc (most projects back then didn't worry as > much about legalities and licensing, etc). It later became a closed > commercial product, which pushed the community to write GPG.
I downloaded and played with the first PGP release. It was exciting but not nearly as usable as it is today, certainly not for email. From the beginning though it has been planned as an email encryption tool, hence the option to ASCII armor the output. There's an interesting story about the source code for PGP. Phil wanted everybody to have encryption, but it was illegal to export PGP out of the country since it was classified as a munition alongside nuclear weapons technology. Yeah, that makes sense. But when printed in a book it was a different story and they were able to get the code out of the country using that hack. http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html Corey /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
