How to Save PGP

Tomcat666 sends in: "The Register got some excerpts from an interview with Phil Zimmerman. He talks about how it might be possible to save PGP (Network Associates couldn't sell it, and will stop its development), OpenPGP and the future (industry-backed OpenPGP?)." A follow-up to our story yesterday about Network Associates mothballing PGP.

Comments

Let's create a /. Corporation

[Choco-man]

/. get's about what, a million unique hits? NAI put 36 million into PGP, and since they're not finding a buyer, we can assume they'd be willing to take somewhat less for it.. let's say 25 million. If /. changes it's subscribtion pay pal account instead to be a funding house to purchase PGP, each user could donate 25 dollars,and we'd have a co-op that now owns PGP. This co-op could then market it as an inexpensive payware product, available for download complete with source code for a $5 license fee. This rids the need for /. subscriptions by generating income, opens the most current version of source code up for review, and allows independant programmers to modify this source code to continually improve the product.

A win win situation! 8-)

IANAL. This is tongue in cheek. I hate having to explain myself...

Open Source probably the solution but not BSD!

[Semi_War]

I've read the article and can derive three possible solutions.

• Slick interface
• Good sponsor
• Open source

Since a slick interface would mean development and they current development is in limbo(with two shipable inferfaces in stock!!) I really don't think that an option. Second option is a sponsor, but since nobody is willing to buy pgp, I don't really think sponsorship will be attrictive to sponsors. Leaves only one option :)

On the server side

[SirSlud]

What about the possibility of PGP technology being a part of the next major upgrade of open internet protocals (ie, POP, SMTP, etc .. )

It seems to be that possibly losing out on the client-side 'niceness' that a commercial PGP implementation provides could be a non issue if the next round of standards include support for providing PGP mechanisms as part of their protocols (not that you'd HAVE to use PGP, but that PGP would somewhere in the protocol if you wanted to use it.)

That would reduce the need to depend on the never-surefire client market penetration in order to see widespead and longterm usage of PGP as a means of protecting ones privacy.

I've always felt open protocols make the best vehicles for propogating public-interest technology. That way, you dont need [Mailclient] + [PGP intergrated client] but [Mailclient that supports Next Gen Protocol X] where one of X's functionality sets uses a private/public key encryption scheme. Not sure what the likelihood of that happening is, tho, both from the perspective of when we'll outgrow the current crop of protocols, whether the new crop will be open enough to get public interests into the design phase, and whether the creators of said protocol would even think it would be a good idea to include a PGP layer in the protocol. :)

Scandelous

[SirSlud]

> And what's scandalous is that NAI has OS X and XP-ready versions, but won't ship them.

We need some laws that force work into the public domain if it wont be exploited for the private domain. I'm sick of companies keeping what will go into the dustbin. This is another example of how too much private interest can /create/ inefficiency in a market rather than reduce it.

Of course, I respect that the work in question would probably have to pass some criterium whereby its release into the public domain would not cause significant damage to the company in question (if the company is to live on), but surely we can't believe that scenarios like this outweigh the benifits of laws forcing companies to push work they lose interest/money in back into the public domain?