Indeed, very exiting news this month: The financial crisis of The GnuPG Project is over. Due to an unexpected amount of donations received in the first days of February we can keep on working for at least the next 2 or 3 years.

How did this happen? At the 31C3 Nico Josuttis arranged an Interview with Julia Angwin who writes for ProPublica. Eventually on the 5th her article was published and immediately received a lot of attention. Not only at the ProPublica site but at many other news site as well. While checking my mail on that evening, I noticed more than thousand notification mails for donations and even better: that continuous stream of donations did not stop for the next days. Alone on the first day we received more than 120,000 € and thus more than our initial goal. I even had to fix the script building the donation progress bar to not overflow the right margin the same night. I also received a call from one of the Stripe founders who offered yearly donations from Stripe and Facebook each at 50,0000 $. Amazing.

I like to thank everyone for supporting the project, be it small or large individual donations, helping users, providing corporate sponsorship, working on the software, and for all the encouraging words by mail, blogs, and even postcards.

Due to that new publicity for GnuPG, I received many requests for interviews and for several days journalists and photographers visited me in my office. They wrote several articles for German papers and radio stations, for example in the taz, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the Deutsche Welle. I hope these articles help to keep up the awareness for the importance of privacy issues.

GnuPG does not stand alone: there are many other projects, often unknown to most people, which are essential to keep the free Internet running. Many of them are run by volunteers who spend a lot of unpaid time on them. They need our support as well!

Now what to do with all that money? Before a final plan can be drafted, tax issues need to be resolved. Given that g10code (the legal entity behind the project) is not a charity, we need to find a way to stretch the use of the money beyond this year. My tax advisor is currently looking into this and I will report on the outcome in another blog entry.

Regardless of this I started to look out for a second developer and fortunately Neal Walfield was searching for a job and accepted my offer to work on GnuPG. Neal is well known for his work on modern operating systems and I consider him an excellent hacker. I am glad to have him on board.