Using gnuPG

[Frank Tobin]

Bob Metelsky, at 12:23 -0500 on 2001-12-10, wrote:

> 1. Are there any restrictions using GnuPG in a small company
> environment? We are only interested in encrypting files and not email

Obligatory: I am not a lawyer.

The license GnuPG is under (the GNU General Public License), along with
all Free Software licenses, have no prohibitions on the internal use of
the software.  Restrictions only come into play when you re-distribute
(and in summary the GPL pretty much says that you have to give the same
rights to your recipients as you received).

> 2. Where is a summary of what exactly GnuPG is? The documentation is
> particularly sparse on this. Most, if not all the documentation refers
> to *using* the program and the RFCs refer primarily to openpgp. Ideally
> I need a sumamry of the functionality of GnuPG to pass onto our clients

You might want to look into documentation that describes what PGP does, as
it was the original idea behind the OpenPGP RFC.
http://www.pgpi.org/ might be helpful for this.

> 3. A very basic question: but what is the difference between GnuPG and
> openpgp and If I'd like to use encryption within a company what are my
> options? Im fairly comfortable with gnuPG and would like to use it if
> possible

GnuPG is a program that implements RFC 2440 (OpenPGP).  OpenPGP is a
standard, not a program (can be confusing, given OpenBSD, OpenSSH, etc,
which are pieces of software).

-- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/