http://www.pgpi.org/doc/faq/pgpi/en/
1.1. What is PGPi?
PGPi is the international variant of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a public key encryption program originally written by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. Later PGP versions have been developed and distributed by MIT, ViaCrypt, PGP Inc., and now Network Associates Inc. (NAI). PGP is the de-facto standard for email encryption today, with millions of users worldwide.
The international PGP versions differ slightly from the US versions, but otherwise they are completely interoperable.
1.2. Why create an international PGP version?
PGP was originally created inside the USA, but eventually spread to the rest of the world despite the US Export Regulations which controlled export of strong cryptography. PGP 5.0i (released in 1997) was the first PGP version that was legally available outside USA/Canada, because the program was exported as printed books and then scanned and OCRed to make the code available in electronic form.
The reasons for scanning the source and releasing a special version, called PGPi, were manyfold:
To make the source code available to the general public. That way anyone could look through the code for errors and hidden backdoors.
To make ports to other operating systems possible: Unix, MS-DOS, OS/2, Amiga, Atari, VMS, etc.
To remove any doubts about the legal status of PGP outside USA/Canada. Though most people believed that PGP was legal to use once exported, many of them still didn't feel good about using software that was at one point illegally exported.
To show how stupid the US Export Regulations were, and that they were not up to date with the real world.
Thanks to the PGPi project, millions of users worldwide have got access to free, strong cryptography. In 1999, the US Government finally lifted the export controls on cryptographic software.