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).
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.
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).
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.