On Aug 28, 2011, at 4:40 AM, Gordon Smith wrote:
Dane is correct. PGP is now one of the expanding Symantec group
which, by definition, puts me off.
While it may be true that symantec has a pgp implementation, pgp
itself is opensource, therefore, it's owned by nobody.
Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of pgp released it as freeware
initially, but after threats from the us government to incarcerate
him for having the product out in the public, he then released the
source, and put it out as freeware as well, to thwart the government
officials.
Every since then, there's been several releases of the program by
several different organizations, (including one by the government
themselves) all of which have claimed ownership of the product, but
none of which in actuality own anything at all.
I'm sure they'll all argue with you (and me) if such is mentioned to
them, but the plain fact of the matter is that since it was released
as freeware, source included, for anyone to do whatever they like
with it (yes, I had a copy of the original distribution) then nobody
(and that includes the government and commercial companies) can claim
ownership of the product itself.
This is why you'll see the entities in question claiming ownership of
particular versions, not pgp as a whole (of course, in some cases,
you need to dig fairly deep into their licenses to find it), but
regardless, unless you're specifically tied to a certain version of
pgp, there's nothing preventing you from downloading the source, and
compiling your own copy from source, which would then be yours w/no
strings attached.
Of course, it's been several years since I've done this, and I don't
know where the original source can be found now, and of course it
won't have all the bells and whistles that have been added by others,
but it will still do the job in most cases.
So, you see, you can still use pgp, without being tied to symantec,
the us government, or any other user/entity if you so desire.
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