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.
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Anonymous2015-02-06 13:13
He should have become a real engineer
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Anonymous2015-02-06 13:19
>>1 love how he has oscilloscope and multimeter on his desk.
Update, Feb. 5, 2015, 8:10 p.m.: 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.
You did it, OP!
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Anonymous2015-02-06 14:23
>>5 We did it together, /prague/. It is you who are the true heroes!
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Anonymous2015-02-06 22:09
I thought he was an oil billionare. Is politics really that expensive?
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Anonymous2015-02-06 22:12
I envy him. Working alone on an opensource project professionally like that would be great, provided you had the funding.
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Anonymous2015-02-06 23:52
>>7 Programming at this level isn't cheap. This work is highly specialized and it's also of grave importance to do it correctly. While most other projects can make tolerances for a bit of buggy behavior, this isn't one of them and it must be done correctly.