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Comment by kleer001 | Hacker News Reader

Misleading title. After the publication of this article that 1 Guy got a buncha money.

Not overly so. After having an article written about him, one guy got the better part of one year's salary in charity. In exchange for 18 years of work maintaining a piece of software that kinda everybody uses.

Another reminder that selling goods and services in exchange for money still works better than giving things away and hoping somebody gives you a donation.

> After having an article written about him, one guy got the better part of one year's salary in charity. In exchange for 18 years of work maintaining a piece of software that kinda everybody uses.

$60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (one-time)

$137,000 in donations (one-time)

$50,000 a year from Facebook (recurring)

$50,000 a year from Stripe (recurring)

I think he got more than one year's salary in one-time funding alone, plus he's got a "salary" of $100,000/yr from Facebook and Stripe together.

The most idealistic funding model that I can think of for this kind of work would be colleges (banned from 'tech transfer' and other money grabs) actually being used to advance academic research and 'core intellectual infrastructure'. Basic, public funded, 'research' and common components support.

Unfortunately, in the US at least and probably elsewhere, the shift has been away from this, since it creates 'competition' with corporations, who also are major funders of both universities and the politicians which create legislation and funding applying to them...

Yeah but he has 6 developers working on it now (including himself).

I had no clue! That's useful information.

Why does the project need 6 developers?

https://www.gnupg.org/donate/index.html

Great to hear that he gets about $100k in "salary". (I guess taxes work differently when you get donations like that.)

At least he won't be starving now. But it would not be a bad thing if someone threw some more money at it, or someone assembled a small team to help out, or something.

Edit: saw in comment below there is a team on it. Good stuff.

Kudos to Facebook and Stripe for stepping up. Either these individuals are funded or some company comes along and acquires them and they lose their independence.

We need to urgently find a sustainable way for individuals to support open source developers or accountability and relationship with end users will continue to diminish.

There must also be ways to gently encourage successful startups to contribute as now it seems they use a whole bunch of open source software and simply forget about it once successful, which is not a sutainable model.

> selling goods and services in exchange for money still works better than giving things away and hoping somebody gives you a donation

The problem is, had he tried to sell GPG, I doubt many people would be using it now...

Well to be honest few people ARE using it now. PK crypto has failed since its inception. It's never been widely adopted. PK has been too hard to implement and manage.

In contrast to say openssh which everyone uses.

What do you mean by "PK crypto"? (OpenSSH makes extensive use of "public-key cryptography", as does, say, HTTPS, and both seem to be massive successes, so I think I am understanding you incorrectly.)

Well, it's misleading now. It wasn't misleading when it was published.

Yes, and normal communication is such that we preface what we're saying if it's set in another time. We don't when we're talking about the present time.

That money pays for far more than Werner's salary:

https://www.gnupg.org/donate/index.html

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