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Network Associates Gives Up Search for PGP Buyer
nakhla writes: "I came across this article which states that Network Associates has given up the search for a buyer for its PGP division. The company has laid off 18 workers, and plans to continue to maintain the product for one year. It's a good thing that there are still products like GnuPG and others out there for people who need cheap, reliable encryption."
I've got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, PGP was revolutionary and is probably one of the main reasons encryption is as free and available today as it is. If Phil hadn't released that (at the expense of considerable suffering), I suspect that the governments of the world would have been able to clamp down on encryption big time, and all of us law abiding types would take it as an axiom that none of us really need anything like that, only terrorists do. It's sad to see the company that was carrying that torch give up on it. I fear this is just one more indication that personal encryption of e-mail and such isn't really going to catch on with the masses.
On the other hand, NAI's not been a perfect angel. Phil left them because of differences about releasing (if memory serves) source code-- not because Phil is an open source advocate per se, so much as for reasons of being able to verify the security. And, myself, I'm an open source geek and have been using GnuPG for quite some time as my encryption software of choice. There still is hope that GnuPG will be turned into something that can catch on with the masses (just like there's hope, however faint, that things like GNOME and KDE will catch on with the masses).
-Rob
First, some kudos to the GnuPG team. I think this is one example of free software really taking over a given market. I only know of one person who uses the commercial version of PGP, and that's because his job requires it. Everyone else I know uses GPG.
Now:
For those of you lucky enough to be using MacOS X (go ahead a flame me - I've been using Unix for ten years, and MacOS X rox my sox), just grab a copy of GnuPG from Fink and install GnuPG.
After that, grab a copy of PGPMail from Sente, and use the easy, one-drag install. It's still in beta, but it's damn nice integration.
For reference, I'm running MacOS X 10.1.3. When I send an email to someone whose public key is in my keyring, I just click the button "Encrypt" before I click send. Voila. When I receive something encrypted, I have the option of having it automatically decrypt, or I just click "decrypt" in the toolbar. Very nice.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Guys, everybody here is missing what really happened here. About a year and a half ago, NAI separated the command line product from the GUI desktop product. NAI discovered that people will pay a large chunk of change for scriptable, command line stuff, and that they almost had to give away the GUI version. When they dissolved the business unit last October, they decided to KEEP the command line version [the McAfee biz unit sells it now, for the same large chunk of $$$] but were trying to sell off the GUI version. Now, riddle me this, riddle me that, how do you sell the GUI version to another company when the command line version you're keeping USES THE SAME CODE?! That's why NAI couldn't sell it -- no company wanted to pick up a product that NAI was going to keep the core product to. I know because I worked for NAI in the PGP division.
It all is a big shame too. The last version, 7.1, was cool. It was stable, had an IPSEC client that could talk to pretty much any VPN gateway out there in addition to creating peer to peer IPSEC tunnels with other PGP clients as well. A mini firewall / IDS rounded it out. Frankly, companies just aren't paranoid enough to require that level of encryption yet. And until that happens, no commercial product is likely to succeed in this arena.