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" <w...@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. > > > _______________________________________________ > Gnupg-users mailing list > Gnupg-users@gnupg.org > http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users >
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