Donations for the previous years:
Year # € net €
2011 21 553 465
2012 53 5991 4963
2013 148 5041 4145
2014 801 34700
Do you think Koch worked much less hard in 2011 or 2012? It's that Snowden's revelations raised awareness both among the potential supporters and by Koch himself (he claimed in the article he'd have quitted due to the "lack of support" hadn't had Snowden "happened") motivating him to continue working.
Then before the ProPublica article, the only known contributions were cca 30000 EUR (apparently the Linux Foundation grant was agreed but still not public). But just in exactly 24 hours since the ProPublica article was published, the contributions were 180000 EUR plus commitment from Facebook and Stripe for 50000 USD yearly each, plus the publishing of the Linux Foundation grant. People who did contribute on that day could see how the "goal bar" moved from "mostly empty" to "full" and above in a few hours.
See the state before the article was published:
https://gnupg.org/donate/kudos.html
Do you think Koch worked much less hard in 2011 or 2012? It's that Snowden's revelations raised awareness both among the potential supporters and by Koch himself (he claimed in the article he'd have quitted due to the "lack of support" hadn't had Snowden "happened") motivating him to continue working.Then before the ProPublica article, the only known contributions were cca 30000 EUR (apparently the Linux Foundation grant was agreed but still not public). But just in exactly 24 hours since the ProPublica article was published, the contributions were 180000 EUR plus commitment from Facebook and Stripe for 50000 USD yearly each, plus the publishing of the Linux Foundation grant. People who did contribute on that day could see how the "goal bar" moved from "mostly empty" to "full" and above in a few hours.