80
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
80 points (71.1% liked)
Privacy
47021 readers
1169 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.