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After this article appeared, Werner Koch informed us that last week he was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. Werner told us he only received permission to disclose it after our article published. Meanwhile, since our story was posted, donations flooded Werner's website donation page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to Koch’s project.
The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.
Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.
"I'm too idealistic," he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. "In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job." But then the Snowden news broke, and "I realized this was not the time to cancel."
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originally posted by: Phantom423
a reply to: roadgravel
The guy is living in an ivory tower common in the academic world - he wants to give everything away and be a do-gooder. It's irrational.
He should have had a plan to monetize the code from the get-go - he could have offered it as a freebee for a while, then sell it outright. I wonder why he doesn't try to sell the whole kit and kaboodle now to Google. He can walk away with some money and let Google solve the problems with the code.
originally posted by: Phantom423
a reply to: roadgravel
The guy is living in an ivory tower common in the academic world - he wants to give everything away and be a do-gooder. It's irrational.
He should have had a plan to monetize the code from the get-go - he could have offered it as a freebee for a while, then sell it outright. I wonder why he doesn't try to sell the whole kit and kaboodle now to Google. He can walk away with some money and let Google solve the problems with the code.
The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater,
the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work,
i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers,
the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others.
—Steiner, The Fundamental Social Law[77]
originally posted by: roadgravel
I doubt most people understand how much work goes into software.
David A. Wheeler argues that the copyleft provided by the GPL was crucial to the success of Linux-based systems, giving the programmers who contributed to the kernel the assurance that their work would benefit the whole world and remain free, rather than being exploited by software companies that would not have to give anything back to the community
originally posted by: roadgravel
a reply to: FyreByrd
Most commercial software has been shipped off the India.
For almost two decades, the open source GnuPG encryption project has teetered on the brink of insolvency. Now, following word of that plight, the lone developer keeping the project alive has received more than $135,000—in a single day, no less.