German Government donates 250,000 DM to GNU Privacy Guard

One of the many ACs wrote in with the news that the German government is donating 250,000 marks (that's about 82,500, or $132,000) to the GNU Privacy Guard project. The article is in German, but the ever reliable Babelfish comes to the rescue.

Comments

A non-Babelfish translation

[Hanno]

Here's my attempt at a translation. Sorry, English is not my first language.



German government fosters open source

The open source project "GNU privacy guard" (GPG) led by the German developer Werner Koch shall receive a financial aid of 250,000 DM by the German Ministry for Enonomy and Science (BMWi) this year. More funds and similar actions shall follow next year. The German government wants to tap the potential of open source development within the area of security related software and hopes to set a signal effect by supporting open source.

The second focus shall be supporting open source projects within security related software projects that the BMWi hope to help increase transparency and reliability of future security products. The core question, according to Ulrich Sandl of the BMWi, is how to increase the transparency of security technology: "It is almost impossible for small to medium businesses today to judge the actual security value of an encryption product."

An important step shall be the support for GPG. "The concept of GPG might help to create a tool that can be used as public domain software without any restrictions for all members of a society - the state, businesses and private users alike can get free access for no charge," says Hubertus Soquat, referent for IT security at the BMWi.

The financial aid for GPG shall mainly be used to create comfortable user interfaces for GPG and to port the tool for various operating systems, various mail clients etc.


Original German article by Stefan Krempl.

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This is VERY significant...

[jd]

Not just in terms of GPG support, but in terms of online privacy. If some of the rough translations posted here are correct, then this money is earmarked for GPG, but further funds will go towards other security & encryption software.

My guess is that, by the end of next year, we could see FreeSWAN, GPG, OpenSSH and OpenSSL all getting similar cash injections.

This can only help people, and the computer industry in particular, and is likely to deal a severe blow to things like the Wassenar Agreement and the US Government's attempts to restrain encryption technology.