The People behind GnuPG

As with all technical things in the world, people and not machines created them and are responsible to keep them running. Software and thus GnuPG is no different. Although software is built using a lot of other software and thus the work of many thousands of people, you may be interested to see who is working on GnuPG. Here is a list of some of them:


Werner Koch

Core components maintainer

Werner started GnuPG in 1997 and still puts most of his working time into the development and maintenance of GnuPG. He has 29 years experience in commercial software development on systems ranging from CP/M systems to mainframes, languages from assembler to Smalltalk and applications from drivers to financial analysis systems. Werner is a long time free software supporter and co-founder of the FSFE. With the support of his brother he founded g10code GmbH in 2001 to make GnuPG development his profession. Werner is full time employed by g10code. He is a founding member and the current chairperson of the GnuPG e.V.

David Shaw

Master of the classic branch

David approached the GnuPG Project in 2002 after the relaxing of the US crypto regulation allowed the participation of US based hackers on international crypto projects. One of his first achievements was a much improved Web-of-Trust implementation. Today he mainly takes responsibility for the keyserver access and the classic GnuPG 1.x branch.

NIIBE Yutaka

Smartcards and Libgcrypt

Niibe is a long time free software hacker who joined the GnuPG project in 2011 and soon took over the development of the smartcard related code. He is also the person behind the Gnuk Token and the MEP game. Niibe’s work on GnuPG is financially supported by g10code. He is a founding member of the GnuPG e.V.

Jussi Kivilinna

Optimization

Jussi joined the GnuPG project in 2012 and worked since then on assembler optimized code for cryptographic algorithms in Libgcrypt.

Andre Heinecke

Windows and UX

Andre is working on GnuPG related projects for GnuPG.com He has been an active KDE Developer since 2009, mostly focused on Windows ports of KDE Software. Since 2013 he took over several Windows and UX specific parts of GnuPG.

Andre is the current maintainer of Kleopatra the KDE / Gpg4win GUI for GnuPG. He also maintains GpgOL since 2013 and wrote the support for Outlook 2010 and later versions. Additonally he is the maintainer of Gpg4win in general and GpgEX as well as the GPGME bindings for C++ and Qt.

He is a founding member and the current cashier of the GnuPG e.V.

GPG Key: 94A5 C9A0 3C2F E5CA 3B09 5D8E 1FDF 723C F462 B6B1


Former developers

The following developers made large contributions to GnuPG in the past but are, sadly, no longer active GnuPG developers.

Most are still working on improving the OpenPGP ecosystem and we wish them the very best.


Marcus Brinkmann

Marcus is part of the free software community since 1997, when he joined the Debian project. Probably best known for his past work on GNU/Hurd, he also has a diploma degree in mathematics, and was part and full time employed by g10code to work on GnuPG and related software from 2001 to 2012 and for 7 months in 2017. He was a founding member of the GnuPG e.V.

Neal Walfied

Neal started to work on GnuPG in 2015 to support maintenance and development in all areas. We was full time employed by g10code from 2015 to 2017. He is a founding member of the GnuPG e.V.

Kai Michaelis

Kai used to work on the Enigmail project from 2015 to 2017. He was part time employed by g10code for that work. He is a founding member of the GnuPG e.V.

Justus Winter

Justus started to work on GnuPG in 2015 to support maintenance and development in all areas. He was full time employed by g10code from 2015 to 2017. He is a founding member of the GnuPG e.V.

Ben McGinnes

Ben started working on GPGME in 2015 with the initial port of PyME from Python 2 to Python 3. Then returned to take over stewardship of Justus' enhanced version of that port from late 2017 to the end of 2018. Ben’s work on GPGP was financially supported by g10code.