Comment Re:Hal Finney (Score 5, Insightful) 222
I know it is against the rules to RTFA, but sometimes it is worth it:
Email encryption first became available to the public in 1991, when Phil Zimmermann released a free program called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, on the Internet.
... The U.S. government subsequently investigated Zimmermann for violating arms trafficking laws because high-powered encryption was subject to export restrictions. In 1997, Koch attended a talk by free software evangelist Richard Stallman, who was visiting Germany. Stallman urged the crowd to write their own version of PGP. "We can't export it, but if you write it, we can import it," he said.
Inspired, Koch decided to try. "I figured I can do it," he recalled. He had some time between consulting projects. Within a few months, he released an initial version of the software he called Gnu Privacy Guard, a play on PGP and an homage to Stallman's free Gnu operating system.
As a side point, Stallman is endlessly criticized around here, laughed at, etc. But he inspired Koch to do something really important and that should be recognized a little bit. Obviously Koch deserves massive praise (and funding) because he did all the work, but it also struck me how important philosophical and moral principles can be in making the world a better place because they can inspire people to do the work.