Philip R. Zimmermann, best known as the author of PGP, and RSADSI have been having a problem for a few years, back in the early part of the ‘90s. Phil wrote a program using the RSA algorithm, after they had received the patent, and it somehow got released. This is a clear violation of the RSA patent. The president of RSADSI was lenient at the time and promised not to sue if Phil promised not to release any more copies. He didn’t, but PGP spread anyway.

Version 2.0 came out, written by an international group, not Phil, and that spread as well. Phil was scrambling to look for a way to make PGP legitimate. He found two ways. The commercial version, he went to ViaCrypt and marketed PGP through their channels. ViaCrypt had a valid license, which made that version legal. Later, Phil had took out the RSA algorithm implementation that he had written, dropped in RSA’s RSAREF 2.0 engine and marketed it under a free non-commercial license. Read the history section for more information. Thus PGP became perfectly legal, as it obtained licenses for a non-commercial, and a commercial license.

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