Independent Encryption Software, GnuPG, Needs Financial Support
Düsseldorf, Germany --- Tuesday, June 6, 2017. The GnuPG Project
today announced the launch of a funding campaign to further support
and improve its leading mail and data encryption software, GnuPG. The
campaign aims to secure 15000 Euro per month in recurring donations
from individual donors to finance the development of their free
software. Donations can be made at the newly reworked website:
<https://gnupg.org/donate/>
Activists, journalists, lawyers, and many others rely on GnuPG to
protect their communication. The software guards emails, files, and
programs from government and criminal snooping and spying on Windows,
Mac, and Linux. And, more than two-thirds of the servers running the
Internet rely on GnuPG to verify the integrity of system updates.
Ongoing government spying revelations have shown how little of our
information is really safe. GnuPG is one of the few tools that can
offer real protection, free of commercial interests. Edward Snowden
used it to encrypt his communications with journalists. Many
institutions use GnuPG because by using an open standard they can be
sure that they will always be able to access their data.
The 6 person development team is currently financed from a successful
campaign in early 2015, regular donations from the Linux Foundation,
Stripe, Facebook, and a few paid development projects. To ensure
long-term stability the new campaign focuses on recurring donations
and not one-time donations. Says lead developer Werner Koch: “We want
to continue our work in the long term. But, we want to do so in such
a way that our first loyalty is unambiguously to the general public.
This means making sure that a majority of our funding comes from
individual donors, and not corporations.”
To highlight GnuPG's role in protecting data, user stories from 26
organizations including activist groups, news organizations, lawyers,
and companies from all over the world have been collected. Their
testimonials are presented in daily changing videos on the campaign
site.
About GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG)
Since 1997, GnuPG has allowed individuals and companies to encrypt and
sign data and communication using the well-established and highly
interoperable OpenPGP standard. It comes with state of the art
cryptography and features a versatile key management system. GnuPG,
also known as GPG or sometimes incorrectly as PGP, can be used
standalone, but has all features needed for easy integration with
other software. It is used as the core cryptography engine of a
wealth of other applications: For example Thunderbird with Enigmail,
Gpg4win, and GPGTools. Most operating systems use GnuPG's signing
ability to protect system updates against malicious attempts to
introduce backdoors. GnuPG is available free of charge, and comes
with all source code to allow anyone to audit the software.
<https://gnupg.org>
About g10 Code GmbH
g10 Code GmbH is the privately owned legal entity behind the GnuPG
Project. They employ all developers and keep all profits for the
development of GnuPG and related free software.
<https://gnupg.org/imprint.html>
### Media contacts:
Neal H. Walfield, Werner Koch
Email: me...@gnupg.org
Phone: +49-2104-4938797 (during European business hours)
Twitter: @gnupg
OpenPGP: 370C 0FC3 1293 B339 61C1 FC20 B367 1B93 6BA8 BCB2
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