Who pays free crypto developers?
Government Aid
The Tor project, which enables anonymous surfing using encryption and numerous proxies, doesn't need the money of the CII, however. The project is financed mainly through larger donors; it gathered more than US$ 2 million in 2012, giving rise to suspicion: Although the project regularly publishes a report [11] listing sources of donations, they included various government organizations once again in 2012. Skeptics speculate that these offices are influencing the development work.
Even without the suspected backdoor, Tor is in the national interest of the US government, because it allows dissidents in authoritarian countries to communicate. The Tor project flatly denies the existence of a backdoor [12] and refers critics to the freely accessible source code for its software.
The Tor project's hosting costs are low because volunteers operate the network's computing nodes (relays; Figure 2); most of the money is spent on development, research, and marketing.
In Germany, projects actively need to seek support from authorities or governments and apply for appropriate tenders. In this way, the GnuPG project also received short-term financial support from Germany's BMI.
In some cases, companies also finance the complete development of a project. One prominent example of this is OpenVPN [13], which is backed by OpenVPN Technologies Inc. "Partners" generate revenue with support contracts and commercial VPN services. In such a model, however, the project depends on a single company, which alone decides which patches to accept and who reviews the software on its behalf.
Crowd Strong?
To raise more money, the GnuPG project started a crowd-funding campaign on Goteo in 2014 (Figure 3) [14]. This form of donation is only suitable for clearly defined objectives; the project wants to revise its website and fund new infrastructure with the funds raised. However, the developers first need to raise user awareness of the campaign and mobilize them. This requires massive work and advertising overhead. If the project hands out rewards depending on the amount of the donation, such as T-shirts, additional costs and other expenses arise.
Most projects are looking for one thing: more time for development. You can only get this if the dedicated developers have enough money to live on. As Werner Koch, the maintainer and creator of GnuPG, outlines in the interview, crowd funding does not typically provide permanent funding, and the figures for OpenSSL and GnuPG clearly show that donations alone cannot solve the problem in the long run.
Above all, projects in which the companies that benefit from the work employ the developers, or substantially finance the development work, seem to be successful.
As Marquess of the Open SSL project stated: "The ones who should be contributing real resources are the commercial companies and governments who use OpenSSL extensively and take it for granted.
Infos
- OpenSSL: http://www.openssl.org
- Heartbleed bug: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
- GnuPG: https://www.gnupg.org
- Core Infrastructure Initiative on OpenSSL: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2014/04/amazon-web-services-cisco-dell-facebook-fujitsu-google-ibm-intel
- Blog post on OpenSSL financing: http://veridicalsystems.com/blog/of-money-responsibility-and-pride/
- OpenSSH: http://www.openssh.com
- OpenSSH book: https://https.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/order?B09=1&B09%2b=Add
- PSW Group: https://www.psw-group.de/en
- OpenSSL consulting: http://opensslfoundation.com/what.html
- CII making progress: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2014/06/announcing-rapid-progress-core-infrastructure-initiative
- Tor financing: https://www.torproject.org/about/financials.html.en
- Tor Project on backdoors: https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#Backdoor
- OpenVPN: http://openvpn.net
- Crowd funding for GnuPG: http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructure
« Previous 1 2
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Canonical Bumps LTS Support to 12 years
If you're worried that your Ubuntu LTS release won't be supported long enough to last, Canonical has a surprise for you in the form of 12 years of security coverage.
-
Fedora 40 Beta Released Soon
With the official release of Fedora 40 coming in April, it's almost time to download the beta and see what's new.
-
New Pentesting Distribution to Compete with Kali Linux
SnoopGod is now available for your testing needs
-
Juno Computers Launches Another Linux Laptop
If you're looking for a powerhouse laptop that runs Ubuntu, the Juno Computers Neptune 17 v6 should be on your radar.
-
ZorinOS 17.1 Released, Includes Improved Windows App Support
If you need or desire to run Windows applications on Linux, there's one distribution intent on making that easier for you and its new release further improves that feature.
-
Linux Market Share Surpasses 4% for the First Time
Look out Windows and macOS, Linux is on the rise and has even topped ChromeOS to become the fourth most widely used OS around the globe.
-
KDE’s Plasma 6 Officially Available
KDE’s Plasma 6.0 "Megarelease" has happened, and it's brimming with new features, polish, and performance.
-
Latest Version of Tails Unleashed
Tails 6.0 is based on Debian 12 and includes GNOME 43.
-
KDE Announces New Slimbook V with Plenty of Power and KDE’s Plasma 6
If you're a fan of KDE Plasma, you'll be thrilled to hear they've announced a new Slimbook with an AMD CPU and the latest version of KDE Plasma desktop.
-
Monthly Sponsorship Includes Early Access to elementary OS 8
If you want to get a glimpse of what's in the pipeline for elementary OS 8, just set up a monthly sponsorship to help fund its continued existence.