where_else

Also another person had pointed out the “close to the election” timing. From what they describe, this AmA is scheduled because the CEO, president, and entire board of OTF were abruptly fired two weeks ago by the new USAGM guy.

If that is a concern, it would be addressed at the new USAGM’s guy why he decided to fire everyone in an election year.

I follow this situation, and was wondering about that. This Verge article has an interesting bit of information, linking some of the activities with the new USAG guy:

In a pair of letters sent last week, two outside coalitions sent letters calling for all OTF funding to be redirected to four specific projects — Ultrasurf, Freegate, Lantern, and Psiphon — chosen for their usefulness in circumventing China’s “Great Firewall.” It would be a drastic narrowing of OTF’s scope, and for grantees, it’s an abrupt clawback of money that had already been contractually promised.

Apparently since certain organizations (Falun Gong is called out specifically) took part in the new USAGM guy's nomination and confirmation, people are afraid he might be more willing to listen to their lobbying requests.

I personally like Psiphon and Lantern, but I think defunding other efforts just to promote the ones we like is not a fair way to go, and isn't effective long term.

Not the OPs but here is my take, since I think this will actually help you support OTF’s model. OP please correct me:

Beauty of open source projects is that you literally can run your own instance. In decentralized designs like Tor, the managers of the system don’t have that much power anyways.

So yeah if FB or Reddit or ... were open source, like OTF asks their grant recipients to be, your concern would be better addressed. Id decentralized, it would be even better! They would not have as much power as they do now.

And that is part of why “diverting funds to few closed source projects” is dangerous. Ultrasurf is great, but one day they can say “we don’t like users in Iran, so let’s ban Iranians [edit: who oppose their government and are] trying to access free internet” and that would the end of discussion. They have as much centralized power over their users as FB does now on their users.

If your opinion is tilting towards a more decentralized and open software model, you already support OTF’s current (and endangered) model IMHO.

They are doing the AMA because the new USAGM guy fired CEO, president, and the entire board of OTF about two weeks ago.

You can ask the USAGM why they did it in an election year.

In 2011, Facebook had only 3200 employees. And they had 700 million users. That’s for all their products at the time.

On why I (or someone like me) doesn’t do it, well that’s precisely the current discussion. Private investors only invest in projects that have the potential for good return. An open source project with no advertising will never make that kind of money, so no private investment. [edit: And good developers/designers/... go where they are paid better. You don’t want to take the risk of failure for a minimum payment wage.]

Entities like OTF have been investing (with proper vetting of projects and transparency) in projects that had no financial return, but were capable of doing something useful. They demand accountability, as you can see in their public monthly reports.

When they invested [edit: link] in Signal (then called TextSecure, because it was on SMS and Redpgone for audio calls) in 2012-2016, there was no promise of return of investment. Now, with more than 10 million downloads only on Android, they have proven themselves. And they don’t need OTF’s money anymore.

So yes it is possible. And that’s why we need OTF to be independent, transparent, and supportive of open source projects no one supports.