Je fais un peu de ménage sur mon site et je suis tombé sur cette vieille page (2002!) que j’avais écrite résumant la petite histoire de GnuPG, OpenPGP et PGP jusqu’à ce moment.

En attendant de trouver une demeure plus définitive pour cette petit chronologie, la voici:

• 1991 – Philip Zimmermann, a software engineer, creates PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”) a strong cryptography software “originally designed for human rights applications, and to protect privacy and civil liberties in the information age”.
• DEC 1996 – PGP Inc. is founded by Zimmermann, after a three-year criminal investigation is dropped by the US government. The investigation was supposed to prove that Zimmermann violated US export restrictions for cryptographic software when PGP spread all around the world following its publication as freeware.
• DEC 1997 – Network Associates Inc. (NAI) acquires PGP Inc.
• DEC 1997 – G10 first release announcement, which would later become GPG
• NOV 1998 – RFC 2440 is published, with “all necessary information needed to develop interoperable applications based on the OpenPGP format”, as the first step to establish OpenPGP as an IETF open (encryption) standard
• Late 2000 – NAI makes PGP no longer open source (meaning their source code is no longer available)
• FEB 2001 – Zimmermann quits NAI and starts the OpenPGP Alliance, “a growing group of companies and other organizations that are implementers of the OpenPGP standard”.
• OCT 2001 – NAI announces a reorganization of the PGP Security Business including integration of PGP Security products into the McAfee and Sniffer business units.
• APR 2002 – NAI drops support of PGP Mail, the commercial version of the original PGP from which others followed, including PGPfile, PGPicq, etc.
• MAY 2002 – Version 1.0.7 of the GNU Privacy Guard is available for download. This is a major release of a complete and free replacement of PGP.
• AUG 2002 – PGP Corporation Announces Purchase of PGP Desktop from Network Associates.
• SEP 2002 – GnuPG 1.2 released
• OCT 2002 – GnuPG 1.2.1 released
• NOV 2002 – WinPT+GnuPG graphical installer released (no longer maintained)
• DEC 2002 – PGP 8.0 released