Werner Koch
Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person Werner Koch (born July 11, 1961) is a German free software developer.<ref name="wayner-new-york-times">Template:Cite news</ref> He is best known as the principal author of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG).<ref name="angwin-propublica">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was also Head of Office and German Vice-Chancellor of the Free Software Foundation Europe. He is the winner of Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2015 for founding GnuPG.<ref name=fsf2015>Library Freedom Project and Werner Koch are 2015 Free Software Awards winners FSF</ref>
Journalists and security professionals rely on GnuPG, and Edward Snowden used it to evade monitoring whilst he leaked classified information from the United States National Security Agency.<ref name="goodin-ars">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Life and workEdit
Koch lives in Erkrath, near Düsseldorf, Germany. He began writing GNU Privacy Guard in 1997, inspired by attending a talk by Richard Stallman who made a call for someone to write a replacement for Phil Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) which was subject to U.S. export restrictions.<ref name="angwin-propublica" /> The first release of GNU Privacy Guard was in 1999 and it went on to become the basis for most of the popular email encryption programs: GPGTools, Enigmail, and Koch's own Gpg4win, the primary free encryption program for Microsoft Windows.<ref name="angwin-propublica" />
In 1999 Koch, via the German Unix User Group which he served on the board of,<ref name="angwin-propublica" /> received a grant of 318,000 marks (about US$170,000) from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology to make GPG compatible with Microsoft Windows.<ref name="wayner-new-york-times" /> In 2005 he received a contract from the German government to support the development of S/MIME.
Journalists and security professionals rely on GnuPG, and Edward Snowden used it to evade monitoring whilst he leaked classified information from the U.S. National Security Agency.<ref name="goodin-ars"/> Despite GnuPG's popularity, Koch has struggled to survive financially, earning about $25,000 per year since 2001<ref name="angwin-propublica" /> and thus considered abandoning the project and taking a better paying programming job.<ref name="goodin-ars" /> However, given Snowden's leaked documents showed the extent of NSA surveillance, Koch continued.<ref name="goodin-ars" /> In 2014 he held a funding drive and in response received $137,000 in donations from the public,<ref name="angwin-propublica" /> and Facebook and Stripe each pledged to annually donate $50,000 to GPG development.<ref name="angwin-propublica" /><ref name="thomson-the-register" /> Unrelated, in 2015 Koch was also awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative.<ref name="thomson-the-register">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>