10 Introduction
GnuPG does not support IDEA because IDEA is less than
completely free. IDEA is licensed under very liberal terms—it’s
free for non-commercial use; if you’ve ever bought a prod-
uct that includes IDEA you have a lifetime, royalty-free IDEA
license; and if all else fails you can buy an IDEA license online
for $18.93. Those terms are modest, especially for modern
software, but it doesn’t meet GnuPG’s standards. (Hey, it’s
their software; they set the standards.) You can hack GnuPG
to support IDEA, but the GnuPG folks won’t do it for you.
PGP Corporation has paid the patent holder, and when you
buy PGP you get access to that cipher. OpenPGP no longer
requires IDEA, but some businesses might require it. If you
find a 10-year-old encrypted ...