GnuPG can now employ second developer

GnuPG, the most important free encryption program, will in future be developed by two paid employees, German IT news site heise reports. After a flood of donations he has been able to employ a second developer, programmer Werner Koch stated in a blog post. “The financial crisis of The GnuPG Project is over”, he wrote.

Koch had previously developed the software virtually on his own and was experiencing financial hardship due to insufficient donations. Many supporters came forward after a report in the media: Koch said that on the first day alone €120,000 in donations was received (posts passim). Internet companies Facebook and Stripe and The Linux Foundation also supported Koch with large donations. Amongst other things, Koch wants to improve the program’s operation with the donations.

GnuPG is the major free cryptography system. It builds upon the PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”) encryption program developed by Phil Zimmermann. E-mail messages and other content can be protected with it so that only the sender and recipient can decrypt them. GnuPG’s system software has from time to time been developed and maintained by Koch on hos own. Other initiatives will attend to the user interface and extensions for email programs with which users can encrypt their emails.