GPG Donation Drive 2017

GnuPG keeps your data private

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GnuPG needs your help

For over 20 years, GnuPG has helped protect online communication. Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), describes GnuPG as "the way that I most often communicate with people who are in need around the world." Sheera Frenkel, Foreign Correspondent for BuzzFeed News, relates: "As a news organization, we're trained on using GPG. "It's about your sources and what happens to them when you leave the country and you publish that explosive story and the government is looking for the whistleblower that handed you that key piece of information." And famously, GnuPG was Edward Snowden's tool of choice to securely communicate with journalists about the NSA mass surveillance leaks.

But, GnuPG is not only used to encrypt email. GnuPG protects the software updates for nearly all free software operating systems, which power two-thirds of all web sites. And, GnuPG is widely used by organizations and companies. For instance, Arthur Jordan, Vice-President of Information Technology at 2U told us: "when we reached out to universities about how they wanted to do secure file transfer, they were already using GPG encryption."

Yet despite the critical role that GnuPG plays for journalists, activists, and lawyers in particular, but, more generally, anyone who uses the Internet, in 2012 GnuPG had a funding crisis. Due to a lack of contracts, Werner Koch, GnuPG's leader, was forced to lay off the only other person working on GnuPG full-time. And, by 2014, Werner had to take side jobs unrelated to GnuPG to supplement his income.

The situation looked so bad that Werner was ready to give up. But, friends convinced him to give crowd funding one more shot. The response was amazing. Not only did the donation campaign raise enough money to fund Werner, but it pulled in 250.000 Euros in small donations, and Stripe, Facebook and the Linux Foundatation each committed to donating about 50.000 Euros per year.

Given this amazing response, Werner decided to grow the team again. To date, he has hired 5 developers, and the past two years have seen a number of improvements to GnuPG and the surrounding ecosystem. For instance, we've worked on simplifying key discovery, adopted a set of Python bindings, contributed some improvements to Enigmail, and supported the GnuK project—a free source and free hardware security token.

Unfortunately, the money from the donation campaign is now nearly exhausted. So, to secure our medium-term future, we've decided to again turn to the community. Our sense is that if we have to feel a responsibility to someone—and it is impossible not to feel that way towards someone who gives you money—then it should be towards the public and not a few corporations. This time, however, our focus is on recurring donations and not one-time donations, like last time.

Our primary goal is to get donation commitments for 15.000 Euros per month—enough to fund 3 developers. We can reach this goal if just 2000 people donate 5 or 10 Euros each month.

This money will firstly allow us to continue our maintenance of GnuPG. It will also be used to fund our work on the GnuK security token, and some other work in the broader ecosystem including continued improvements to Enigmail. One major new project that it will fund is a book called "An Advanced Introduction to GnuPG." This handbook has three principle audiences: developers who want to integrate GnuPG into their programs, and need to understand the various concepts, the important security tradeoffs, and common pitfalls; digital security trainers who need to understand GnuPG to be able to make sound recommendations to their students; and enthusiasts.

If we manage to double this number of donations—if 4000 people donate 5 or 10 Euros each month—then we will continue to grow the team. In particular, we will hire someone to work on GPG Tools, which so many activists and journalists rely on to secure their online communication. Further, ...

Now, maybe you don't use GPG to encrypt your email. Nevertheless, some journalists whose work you value rely on GnuPG to protect their sources, some activists fighting for a cause that you sympathize with rely on GnuPG to protect their communication, and some lawyers speaking with their clients rely on GnuPG to protect attorney-client conversations. And, free software-based operating systems use GnuPG to verify software updates. So, if you are convinced as we are that this work is essential to protecting democracy, then please help us to continue our work and stay independent, for just the cost of one coffee each month.

GPG Donation Drive 2017

GnuPG keeps your data private

GnuPG needs your help

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