Is Dangerzone Free and Open Source, and Who Maintains It?

Updated

Yes. Dangerzone is a free and open source project, and it is maintained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), a nonprofit organization that protects and defends press freedom. The project describes itself as a public good, which means the tool is intended to be freely available and openly developed rather than sold as a commercial product.

What "free and open source" means here

  • Free: The project is offered at no cost. The site presents Dangerzone as a free and open source project, not as a paid product.
  • Open source: The source code is available, and the project invites users to build from source. The download page includes a "Build from Source" option under Other Linux, which is consistent with an open source distribution model.
  • Public good: Dangerzone is framed as a public good maintained by a nonprofit, rather than a commercial vendor.

Who maintains Dangerzone

Dangerzone is maintained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). FPF is described as a nonprofit organization that protects and defends press freedom. This matters for users who care about the long-term stewardship of a security tool: the maintainer is a mission-driven nonprofit, not a company monetizing the software.

Why the maintainer matters for a security tool

Dangerzone's purpose is to sanitize potentially dangerous documents. According to the project, it:

  • Removes malware by rendering a document into pixels inside a secure sandbox and reconstructing it locally as a PDF.
  • Supports more than 20 file types, including PDFs, all major office-suite formats, and the most common image types.
  • Avoids network access, so documents are sanitized in a sandbox with no network access.

Because the tool handles untrusted files, knowing who maintains it and under what model is part of evaluating whether to rely on it. A nonprofit maintainer with a press-freedom mission is the relevant context the project itself provides.

Practical takeaways

  • If you are looking for a no-cost tool to convert potentially dangerous documents into safe PDFs, Dangerzone fits that description based on its own project page.
  • If you want to inspect or build the software yourself, the project provides a "Build from Source" path.
  • If organizational accountability matters to you, the maintainer is the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit focused on press freedom.

For the latest version and platform-specific downloads, the project page lists Dangerzone 0.11.0 with options for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora, Tails, other Linux, and Qubes OS (Beta).