Some thoughts on the future of OpenPGP and GnuPG

[Werner Koch]

On Tue,  2 Jul 2019 16:03, gnupg-users at gnupg.org said:

> With "big boys" I meaned the German Government, German BSI and Facebook.

I, or well my company g10 Code GmbH, has currently no contracts with the
German government or the BSI.  We had projects with the BSI but no
funding whatsoever.  These projects are the usual invitation for bid, a
bid by us (together with Intevation GmbH), and with luck the bid was
then accepted.  The last such project ended about 2 years ago.

Right now we are talking to companies and also institutions like the BSI
with the goal to sell support contracts (under the gnupg.com label);
that is a new effort Andre and me started this year.

Facebook and Stripe both donate 50k USD per year to support GnuPG
because they use it internally and with their customers and users.  They
are obviously interested to keep the software well maintained.

We also have recurring donations from individuals which are really
helpful and encouraging.  Thanks.

> I assume that 99.9 % of GnuPG /gpg4win users have not seen this before.

This is an old (2014) video showing the answer to a parliamentarian
question by MdB Christian Ströbele on why support for German crypto
[GnuPG] is such low.  The answer has some numbers on money spent via BSI
and BMWI for these purposes.  We tried to figure out how they get to
these numbers and it seems they lumped together different efforts over a
long period of time.

Anyway, it might have helped that new invitations for bids were sent out
by the BSI and Intevation and g10 Code where lucky enough to get
acceptance for our bids on 3 projects (Gpg4all, EasyGpg and Gpg4vs-nfd).
They worked quite well and for the first time we actually made some
profit form these projects.  See [1] for short article on g10 Code's
profits in 2016 and [2] for the balance sheet of 2017.

Unfortunately I have had not found the time to write about the year
2017, or even 2018, on how we are doing.  This lack of time of mine is
partly caused by the departure of 3 of our employers to move on to pEp
and hack on their projects over there.  Anyway, we are currently without
financial problems and are more troubled to find good developers who
have a professional working habit and, best, have some experience in our
field.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner


[1] https://gnupg.org/blog/20170904-financial-results-2016.html
[2] https://gnupg.org/blog/data/g10code-bilanz-2017-pub.pdf

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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