News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on GnuPG 2.1.2 released. Parent comment

Re:GnuPG 2.1.2 released by nothrabannosir on Thursday February 12, 2015 @08:03AM (#9038581)
Not to take away from the article, but this is like saying Yo-Yo Ma is so good at playing the Cello because he's talented.

He is talented, but that's not why he's good. He's good because of years of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears.

Most of the success of this campaign is due to Werner Koch's years of hard work. The article was the catalyst.

EDIT: I'm as grateful as the next guy for all the generous donors, to Propublica for publishing the article and to Julia Angwin for writing it. Let's just not forget who the real hero of this story is.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:GnuPG 2.1.2 released by acqq on Thursday February 12, 2015 @01:12PM (#9040239)
Claiming "most" is "due to" "years of hard work" sounds good but is far from enough to explain what actually happened.

See the state before the article was published:

https://gnupg.org/donate/kudos.html

   Donations for the previous years:
   Year 	# 	€ 	net €
   2011 	21 	553 	465
   2012 	53 	5991 	4963
   2013 	148 	5041 	4145
   2014 	801 	34700
Do you think Koch worked much less hard in 2011 or 2012? It's that Snowden's revelations raised awareness both among the potential supporters and by Koch himself (he claimed in the article he'd have quitted due to the "lack of support" hadn't had Snowden "happened") motivating him to continue working.

Then before the ProPublica article, the only known contributions were cca 30000 EUR (apparently the Linux Foundation grant was agreed but still not public). But just in exactly 24 hours since the ProPublica article was published, the contributions were 180000 EUR plus commitment from Facebook and Stripe for 50000 USD yearly each, plus the publishing of the Linux Foundation grant. People who did contribute on that day could see how the "goal bar" moved from "mostly empty" to "full" and above in a few hours.

[ Parent | on HN ]