GnuPG and g10 code

Mon Dec 15 13:02:26 CET 2014

Thanks for the good work! Do you get any income from kernel concepts with
sale of the OpenPGP smart cards? I prefer to buy products from for-profit
companies, and donate only to charities / nonprofit organizations.
On Dec 15, 2014 2:54 AM, "Werner Koch" <wk at gnupg.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> last week I basically finished the new infrastructure for www.gnupg.org
> <http://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gnupg-doc.git> and posted a
> new blog entry which you find below in plain text.  If anyone has an
> interesting thing to say about GnuPG and related topics, drop me a note
> and we can publish it there.  The blog part of the site has no comment
> functions because I find it easier to have discussions by mail.
>
>
> Salam-Shalom,
>
>    Werner
>
> ====
> <https://gnupg.org/blog/20141214-gnupg-and-g10.html>
>
>
>   After the release of GnuPG 1.0 in 1999 it turned out that this was not
>   a write once and forget project.  The unrestricted availability of the
>   software and public concerns about the acquirement of /PGP Inc./ by
>   /NAI Inc./ (coincidentally at the time of the initial GnuPG release in
>   December 1997) raised a lot of interest by those who always cared
>   about privacy issues.
>
>   Fortunately the funding of the Windows port by the German Ministry of
>   Economics helped to finance the maintenance and further developments
>   in 1999 and 2000.  After that I decided to keep on working on GnuPG
>   full time and founded [g10^code GmbH] in 2001 as a legal framework for
>   it.  The company is owned entirely by my brother [Walter] and myself
>   and I like to thank him for his long time support and waive of profit
>   distribution.  If you ever wondered about the name: /g10/ is a
>   reference on the German constitution article on freedom of
>   communication (Grundgesetz [Artikel 10]) and a pun on the [G-10] law
>   which allows the secret services to bypass these constitutional
>   guaranteed freedoms.
>
>   The best known project of g10^code is probably version 2 of GnuPG,
>   which started under the name /NewPG/ as part of the broader /Aegypten/
>   project.  The main goal of Aegypten was to provide support for S/MIME
>   under GNU/Linux and integrate that cleanly with other mail clients,
>   most notably KMail.  This project was due to a public tender of the
>   [BSI] (German federal office for information security) and awarded to
>   a consortium of g10^code, [Intevation], and [KDAB].  Another large
>   project is [Gpg4win] which has its roots in a port of GnuPG-2 to
>   Windows done by g10^code as part of a health research project.
>   Another tender awarded to the same consortium extended this port to
>   the now mostly used GnuPG distribution for Windows.
>
>   Now, how viable is it to run a company for the development of free
>   security software?  Not very good I had to realize: the original plan
>   of selling support contracts did not worked out too well due to the
>   lack of resources for marketing.  Larger development projects raised
>   most of the revenues but they are not easy to acquire.  In the last
>   years we had problems to get new GnuPG related development contracts
>   which turned the company into a one-person show by fall 2012.  I
>   actually planned to shut it down in 2013 and to take a straight coder
>   job somewhere.  However, as a side effect of Edward Snowden‘s brave
>   actions, there was more public demand for privacy tools and thus I
>   concluded that it is worth to keep on working on GnuPG.
>
>   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>    year  profit  wages  n  balance
>   ─────────────────────────────────
>    2001  -12000  11000  2    31000
>    2002    3000  40000  3    32000
>    2003  -16000  26000  3    35000
>    2004    3000  45000  4    52000
>    2005       0  44000  4    56000
>    2006    2000  48000  3    49000
>    2007   50000  57000  2    99000
>    2008   11000  75000  3    94000
>    2009  -23000  72000  3    68000
>    2010   28000  74000  2    78000
>    2011  -41000  63000  2    81000
>    2012  -16000  54000  2    45000
>    2013  -10000  32000  1    44000
>    2014   12000  32000  1    47000
>   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>
>   The table above is a summary of g10^{code}’s balance sheets (in Euro,
>   2014 are estimations). /profit/ gives the annual net profit or loss,
>   /wages/ are the gross salary costs for the /n/ employed developers,
>   and /balance/ is the balance sheet total.  Despite of our low wages we
>   accumulated an estimated loss of 9000 Euro over the last 3 years.  The
>   crowdfunding campaign last year proved that there are many people who
>   like to see GnuPG alive and maintained.  Despite the huge [costs] of
>   the campaign it allowed me to keep working on GnuPG and I am confident
>   that there will be ways to continue work in 2015.
>
>
>   [g10^code GmbH] https://g10code.com
>
>   [Walter] http://www.u32.de
>
>   [Artikel 10]
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artikel_10_des_Grundgesetzes_f%C3%BCr_die_Bundesrepublik_Deutschland
>
>   [G-10]
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetz_zur_Beschr%C3%A4nkung_des_Brief-,_Post-_und_Fernmeldegeheimnisses
>
>   [BSI] http://www.bsi.de/EN/
>
>   [Intevation] https://intevation.de/index.en.html
>
>   [KDAB] https://kdab.com
>
>   [Gpg4win] http://www.gpg4win.org
>
>   [costs] file:20140512-rewards-sent.org
>
>
> --
> Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
>
>
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>
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