PGP compatibility

Michael Roth mroth@nessie.de
Mon, 27 Sep 1999 12:37:17 +0200 (CEST)


On Sat, 25 Sep 1999, J Horacio MG wrote:


> While I believe there is very little reason for using pgp 2.x within the
> *nix community, the truth is that there are still very many using it.
> This is a bit of nonsense since gnupg has more support for those
> environments than PGP right now. But while there are still people using
> pgp 2.x, the issue about the full compatibility of GnuPG with IDEA and RSA
> remains.
I think this is a question of time. I didn't switched from PGP 2.6 to PGP 5.x too. The reason was the different license and other politicaly issues. But when I found GnuPG I was sure this is the future: It is absolute free in all aspects. The result was that I droped PGP 2.6 usage. Of course, there will be many users who are more conservative and they will switch to GnuPG more slowly than others. But IMHO as time passes on many users will switch to GnuPG because it has so many advantage over PGP 2.6. Currently many people even don't know about the existence of GnuPG. They only know PGP. But this will change constantly. Because more and more people will know GnuPG, more and more people will switch. And then comes the trick: As more and more people will use GnuPG, more and more people will hear about GnuPG! As you can see: The loop is closed. GnuPG is about privacy. This is a very sensitive matter. You couldn't establish a tool which touches privacy in a few months. You must calculate with some years. The community needs this time to gain trust into GnuPG. cu Michael