Werner Koch
More info
- Known for
- GnuPG (1997–)
- Affiliation
- g10 Code
German programmer who has spent more than a quarter of a century as lead maintainer of GnuPG, the encryption tool much of the free-software world signs with.
Koch started GnuPG in 1997 as a free replacement for PGP, whose patent and export problems made it unusable for the GNU project. Version 1.0 shipped in 1999, implementing the OpenPGP standard. It went on to sign the packages of most Linux distributions and protect the email of journalists and activists.
In 2015 ProPublica reported that the world's email encryption effectively depended on one man who was going broke. Within days donations poured in, including from the Linux Foundation, Facebook and Stripe. He later fell out with the IETF over the next version of the standard, and GnuPG now follows the parallel LibrePGP specification instead.