GnuPG used to ask for your support to help protect online privacy
Activists, journalists, lawyers, and many others rely on GnuPG to protect their communication. And, nearly all free software-based operating systems (which are used by more than two-thirds of the servers running the Internet) rely on GnuPG to verify the integrity of system updates.
GnuPG development was mainly financed by donations. Aside of the large donors Linux Foundation, Stripe, Facebook, and First Look Media, we received a lot of individual donations. Our fundraising campaign in 2017 also raised about 5000 Euro in monthly recurring donations.
Many thanks to all supporters
Fortunately, and this is still not common with free software, we have now established a way of financing the development while keeping all our software free and freely available for everyone.
Our model is similar to the way RedHat manages RHEL and Fedora: Except for the actual binary of the MSI installer for Windows and client specific configuration files, all the software is available under the GNU GPL and other Open Source licenses. Thus customers may even build and distribute their own version of the software as long as they do not use our trademark GnuPG VS-Desktop®.
Those with SEPA donations, please cancel them and redirect your funds to other projects which are more in need of financial support. The donations done via Stripe or PayPal have already been canceled.
All you supporters greatly helped us to keep GnuPG alive and to finally setup a sustainable development model. Stay tuned for a somewhat longer writeup on this.
Thanks.