[OT?] No more financial support for GnuPG

[Burns]

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Does GnuPG have a donations page? If it does, I haven't noticed it.

Some examples of what I mean:

Ways to Support KDE
http://www.kde.org/support/support.php

Contributing to The Apache Software Foundation
http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

The FreeBSD Foundation
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/index.html#donations

Friends of GNOME
http://www.gnome.org/friends/


Randy


- --- Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 May 2003 22:46:14 +0200, Juergen Fenn said:
> 
> > According to German IT news service heise.de the German Federal
> > Government will no longer sponsor development of GnuPG:
> 
> Well, it says that there won't be any direct funding[1].  The
reason
> is that they want to foster competition and not finance a few
> projects.
> 
> The problem is that a Free Software project won't be able to
compete
> against a proprietary product as long as the long term values of
Free
> Software are not understood by most people responsible for IT
> decisions.  Software development is expensive and whether it is
> proprietary or free doesn't change much of the actual development
> costs.  There are other costs involved with commercial products
> (e.g. advertising) which a Free Software project can't afford
because
> there is no way of re-financing this utilizing the money printing
> machinery of license fees (if you are one of the not so many with
a
> "killer" application).  Thus, any competition between a Free
Software
> project and a proprietary product will be unfair.
> 
> The big advantages of Free Software are the avoidance of vendor
> lock-in, the in general better standard compliance, the abstain
of
> unneeded gadgets for marketing reasons and the huge base of
valuable
> testers and other helpers.  Still this can't compete with a
commercial
> and proprietary product.  Taking me as an example, I spend a lot
of my
> time with general GnuPG maintenance and trying to find additional
time
> to do new developments - only a very small amount of this gets
paid
> for by consulting/support/development.  This is a hard business
and I
> recall several times when I considered to give it all up and take
a
> straight coder job somewhere.  As long as the perception of Free
> Software is directed towards the free as in beer aspect, I doubt
that
> it will change.
> 
> Advertised bidding with fair treatment of Free Software companies
are
> of course a good solution to foster the development of Free
Software.
> In my experience, those tenders often stress too often the money
> saving factor and do not consider the extra value given by
non-vendor
> lock-in and better standard compliance.  Support contracts are
also a
> good revenue source but there are too many answers already
available
> on the net .-) so that companies might not consider to seek for
> commercial support.
> 
> > I would like to ask what will be the implications from this?
Support
> > worth millions of Euros has been put on halt, heise.de says.
German
> 
> That is in so-far not true, as the article from last fall talking
> about this has to be considered a fake - according to German
> officials.
> 
> > platforms unless there would have been some sponsoring. So will
this
> > change of policy slow down or even threaten further development
of
> > GnuPG for Windows? 
> 
> I can only speak for me and my company: Without financial support
we
> won't be able to do much for Windows; so it is up to the
volunteer to
> do this in their spare time or with other companies resources.
> 
> 
> Salam-Shalom,
> 
>    Werner
> 
> 
> [1] Regarding the funding activities: There used to be the GnuPG
> funding of the BMWi in 1999/2000 with a total amount of 140kEuro
> (where we learned a lot on how not to spend money for ;-) and the
> GnuPP CD + manual project in early 2002; I don't know any details
> about the latter.
> 

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