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Werner Koch (born July 11, 1961) is a German free software developer. He is best known as the principal author of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG). He was also Head of Office and German Vice-Chancellor of the Free Software Foundation Europe. He is the winner of Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2015 for founding GnuPG. Library Freedom Project and Werner Koch are 2015 Free Software Awards winners FSF
Journalists and security professionals rely on GnuPG, and Edward Snowden used it to evade monitoring whilst he News leak classified information from the United States National Security Agency.
In 1999 Koch, via the German Unix User Group which he served on the board of, received a grant of 318,000 marks (about US$170,000) from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology to make GPG compatible with Microsoft Windows. In 2005 he received a contract from the German government to support the development of S/MIME.
Journalists and security professionals rely on GnuPG, and Edward Snowden used it to evade monitoring whilst he News leak classified information from the U.S. National Security Agency. Despite GnuPG's popularity, Koch has struggled to survive financially, earning about $25,000 per year since 2001 and thus considered abandoning the project and taking a better paying programming job. However, given Snowden's leaked documents showed the extent of NSA surveillance, Koch continued. In 2014 he held a funding drive and in response received $137,000 in donations from the public, and Facebook and Stripe each pledged to annually donate $50,000 to GPG development. Unrelated, in 2015 Koch was also awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative.
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