A feel good story for today: after months of making very little progress, the GPG crowdfunding campaign took off last night big time after Julia Angwin published an article about the project’s dire financial situation in ProPublica.

Werner Koch main (and mostly sole) developer of GPG. Photo courtesy of ProPublica.

Redditors picked up the story and shared it on the r/linux subreddit at around 6 pm CET. The news was also shared widely on Facebook, G+ and Twitter by sympathisers and Free Software activists

Gnu Privacy Guard blew past the 120,000 euros the project was aiming for, raising 110,000 euros in just over 6 hours. At the moment of writing, funding stands at over 150,000 euros. The funds will guarantee the continuity of the project through 2015.

But there was more good news to come: The story caught the attention of two corporate backers, Stripe and Facebook, each of which have pledged to support the project with $50,000 a year for the foreseeable future.

Gnu Privacy Guard is widely used on all personal operating systems to encrypt securely email and other over-the-wire messages. It is important the project maintains its independence to avoid being tampered with by corporations or government agencies.

Pling helps open and free projects by providing a platform for easy fund raising and supplying coverage to open sourced projects. Join Pling and tell us about your work.

Cover image: Cool dark keys by ematil1023 for Freeimages.com.