Dissolving the GnuPG e.V.

[Andre Heinecke]

Hi,

I am proposing to dissolve the GnuPG e.V.:

When I helped to found this Verein and wrote the constitution the future of 
GnuPG was unclear. GnuPG mostly relied on donations and maybe public funding 
from the BSI, with which we could not calculate. So we needed a charitable 
Verein in my opinion to ensure that work on GnuPG and the intention behind it.

With the intention behind GnuPG I mean that "The Best possible crypto should 
be available for everyone, always, and open source." Which is part of our 
Vereins goals. 

But I now believe that the Vereins goals are either met, or can better be 
reached by other means.

Since I took over most of Werner's brothers shares and started working full 
time for g10 Code we have developed the company so far that donations are no 
longer required, we even canceled them [1] so we also do not need the Verein 
for charitable donations.

With OpenPGP booming [4], we are now at a point in my opinion that GnuPG and 
especially OpenPGP is so established in the European economy and public sector 
that it will never go away since it is now basically critical infrastructure. 
Thanks to our copyleft license this directly ensures that the public will 
profit from all that.

Even if g10 Code would bankrupt or both Werner and me would share an unlucky 
bus there are billon dollar companies ready to pick up. That is even before 
mentioning other OpenPGP implementations which have gotten more established 
since we founded the Verein.


So we concentrated on the business and to promote GnuPG through that and the 
Verein mostly rotted and did nothing really. The little which we did as the 
Verein, pick up a few travel costs here and there and payed for a public 
Keyserver could easily be picked up by a for profit like g10 or Intevation from 
the Gpg4win donations.

So in conclusion I would suggest closing the Verein down and find a worthy heir 
to the funds of our donors. Which is still ~130k€

I believe that the KDE e.V. [2] Should be this heir. With KMail, Kmymoney, 
KWallet and now Okular they provide easy to use and accessible frontends for 
GnuPG. That is even before mentioning Kleopatra which is our main User 
Interface.

I believe their goals align with ours, KDE e.V. is in my opinion a healthy, 
professionally managed Verein and could put our donors money to good use 
without being wasteful. Also that it is a charitable German Verein helps 
legally.
KDE software is privacy focused and with some apps in the Windows Store and 
all others available through WSL we would not even alienate our donors that 
use windows exclusively.

Additionally I would propose a donation of 15.000 Euro to the Free Software 
Friends in Düsseldorf [3] for their help in establishing our Verein, probable 
legal help in dissolving it and in general to continue to promote our work 
publicly. We also verbally agreed to pay our part of the rent for the shared 
office, so this should be covered by that.

Before moving on to the next steps I just wanted to put this suggestion out 
there and ask for opinions.

Best Regards,
Andre

1: https://gnupg.org/blog/20220102-a-new-future-for-gnupg.html
2: https://ev.kde.org/whatiskdeev/
3: https://freie-software.org/verein/
4: We have been a bit silent about this and are aware that we need to blog / 
talk about the current state of OpenPGP adaption more publicly.

-- 
GnuPG.com - a brand of g10 Code, the GnuPG experts.

g10 Code GmbH, Erkrath/Germany, AG Wuppertal HRB14459
GF Werner Koch, USt-Id DE215605608, www.g10code.com.

GnuPG e.V., Rochusstr. 44, D-40479 Düsseldorf.  VR 11482 Düsseldorf
Vorstand: W.Koch, B.Reiter, A.Heinecke        Mail: board at gnupg.org
Finanzamt D-Altstadt, St-Nr: 103/5923/1779.   Tel: +49-211-28010702
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