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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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We need to find a way to fund critical FLOSS. No, not like that!
40,000$ per month is way more than anyone will ever need. For sure I would stop donating, from the top of my 1,400€ per month.
I agree that's quite a lot of money. I'm not sure what if any the cap should be. I guess my attitude is that if they are bringing in so much money, and everyone working there is getting a fair cut... then power to them? I don't donate either, though I've been using Signal since before it was called that. I remember when they first introduced calling as a companion app called Red Phone.
I think that's precisely what this is questioning : is this helping fund critical FOSS?
What if a fraction of that money instead went to Signal infrastructure? Wikimedia? FSF which initially made GNU PG? FSFE? NLNet which supports Delta Chat? Sovereign Tech Fund? etc rather than individuals?
I don't think anybody is criticizing that hard working people contributing to a good project are well paid. I believe the question is rather what's the cost to OTHER projects when there is 1 project, not an umbrella projects which funds others (again like NLNet or the Sovereign Tech Fund).
What model are we reproducing and what's the risk?
FWIW the question isn't new. It happens also with Mozilla with the compensation of its C-suite staff, not the "random" software engineer.
I think it clearly is helping. Signal is a mature, polished project. It is first-class. The infrastructure is obviously well-funded. As for other projects, I also wish they had more money but I don't think it's useful to criticize Signal for the fact that they don't.