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.
Werner started GnuPG in 1997 He has 29 years experience in software development. Werner is a long time free software supporter and co-founder of the FSFE.
Neal started to work on GnuPG in 2015 to support maintenance and development in all areas.
Justus started to work on GnuPG in 2015 to support maintenance and development in all areas.
Marcus is part of the free software community since 1997, when he joined the Debian project. Probably best known for his past work on GNU/Hurd.
Kai is working on the Enigmail project since 2015.
Niibe is a long time free software hacker who joined the GnuPG project in 2011 and soon took over the development of the smartcard related code. He is also the person behind the Gnuk Token and the MEP game.