After the release of GnuPG 1.0 in 1999 it turned out that this was not a write once and forget project. The unrestricted availability of the software and public concerns about the acquirement of PGP Inc. by NAI Inc. (coincidentally at the time of the initial GnuPG release in December 1997) raised a lot of interest by those who always cared about privacy issues.

Fortunately the funding of the Windows port by the German Ministry of Economics helped to finance the maintenance and further developments in 1999 and 2000. After that I decided to keep on working on GnuPG full time and founded g10^code GmbH in 2001 as a legal framework for it. The company is owned entirely by my brother Walter and myself and I like to thank him for his long time support and waive of profit distribution. If you ever wondered about the name: g10 is a reference on the German constitution article on freedom of communication (Grundgesetz Artikel 10) and a pun on the G-10 law which allows the secret services to bypass these constitutional guaranteed freedoms.

The best known project of g10^code is probably version 2 of GnuPG, which started under the name NewPG as part of the broader Aegypten project. The main goal of Aegypten was to provide support for S/MIME under GNU/Linux and integrate that cleanly with other mail clients, most notably KMail. This project was due to a public tender of the BSI (German federal office for information security) and awarded to a consortium of g10^code, Intevation, and KDAB. Another large project is Gpg4win which has its roots in a port of GnuPG-2 to Windows done by g10^code as part of a health research project. Another tender awarded to the same consortium extended this port to the now mostly used GnuPG distribution for Windows.

Now, how viable is it to run a company for the development of free security software? Not very good I had to realize: the original plan of selling support contracts did not worked out too well due to the lack of resources for marketing. Larger development projects raised most of the revenues but they are not easy to acquire. In the last years we had problems to get new GnuPG related development contracts which turned the company into a one-person show by fall 2012. I actually planned to shut it down in 2013 and to take a straight coder job somewhere. However, as a side effect of Edward Snowden’s brave actions, there was more public demand for privacy tools and thus I concluded that it is worth to keep on working on GnuPG.

year	profit	wages	n	balance
2001	-12000	11000	2	31000
2002	3000	40000	3	32000
2003	-16000	26000	3	35000
2004	3000	45000	4	52000
2005	0	44000	4	56000
2006	2000	48000	3	49000
2007	50000	57000	2	99000
2008	11000	75000	3	94000
2009	-23000	72000	3	68000
2010	28000	74000	2	78000
2011	-41000	63000	2	81000
2012	-16000	54000	2	45000
2013	-10000	32000	1	44000
2014	12000	32000	1	47000

The table above is a summary of g10^code’s balance sheets (in Euro, 2014 are estimations). profit gives the annual net profit or loss, wages are the gross salary costs for the n employed developers, and balance is the balance sheet total. Despite of our low wages we accumulated an estimated loss of 9000 Euro over the last 3 years. The crowdfunding campaign last year proved that there are many people who like to see GnuPG alive and maintained. Despite the huge costs of the campaign it allowed me to keep working on GnuPG and I am confident that there will be ways to continue work in 2015.

Due to the successful funding campaign the above listed estimated profit for 2014 was overtopped and reached 34000 Euro.