On 20/02/14 11:50, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote: > Hi, > > After CTS4 I started thinking about getting funding. When now Steve > had to start looking for a job, I asked Sandy for help on getting > funding, and she connected me to some people who know their stuff and > are willing to help. > > For this I asked on FMS last week if people would want to set specific > limits on funding. Things like “no governmet” and such. I did not have > time to forward this here, which is a shortcoming I now want to > correct. > > One of the funding advisers, with whom Sandy from OpenITP got me in > contact, asked me the following question: > > For grants one important consideration, particularly when moving > from a user-funded project, is: do you have particular guidelines > that you would like to follow for funding? Are you OK if a company > funded you, or perhaps only certain companies? Would any > government funding be OK or would you like to avoid government > funding, or specific governments such as the US? > > On this it’s not just my opinion which matters here, but the opinion > of all freenet users. So I would like to have *your* opinion on > that. In case you ask yourself whether you’re entitled to answer: If > you read this, then you are. > > The discussion on FMS is at > > freenet → Funding for freenet - limiting funders? We need your opinion I am in favour of accepting government funding, provided that we don't become totally dependant on it. I don't believe government introducing backdoors and government funding are correlated in an open source project. What can happen (look at Tor) is that government is only interested in funding certain aspects of our work, which can distort priorities; this can be managed to some degree by top-slicing, and it's a problem with almost any major funding.
IMHO accepting government funding isn't much different to accepting funding from major corporates such as Google, who have been very generous to us in the past and have a reputation for trying to do the right thing, while simultaneously being partly responsible for some of the dangerous Internet trends of the last decade. Having said that, talking to (unnamed, hearsay) Tor people, US government funding is believed to be very much more difficult to get now than it used to be, and often goes to people they have existing connections with.
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