The Freedom Box project is sponsored by the FSF and by Eben Moglen, who I see
as one of the true fighters for software freedom and a real person of
principles. The project is definitely very ambitious and has so far taken
much longer than expected to get going, but it does seem very promising if it
can actually be made to work. Moglen has achieved more for software freedom
and fighting the crypto wars of the 90's, as well as being very instrumental
in GPL, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and others
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen).
As a side note, some months ago I visited the freedomboxfoundation.org
website and realized that they used google analytics and they embedded a
youtube video on their front page. I wrote one of the organizers at the
Software Freedom Law Center (softwarefreedom.org) to let them know and
suggest that the aforementioned seemed to be contrary to the idea of privacy.
As far as I can tell they did remove both google analytics and the embedded
youtube video were removed. I never received a response though.
I do really hope Freedom Box becomes a usable product and through it perhaps
a real mesh network can be started.
Also, regarding Mailpile. Moglen made a USD $4000+ donation to the project,
an endorsement that I see as something very positive.
I don't know all the people working on Mailpile. One of them though, Smari
McCarthy worked on the Collateral Murder video with Wikileaks and has been
subsequently investigated by the USG. Somewhere on his blog there is some
proof of this in the way of FOIA requests. This seems to give the project, in
my opinion, some good karma as far as I can tell.
If you don't know who Eben Moglen is, this speech he delivered at Re:publica
2012 might be a good place to start:
https://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-WhyFreedomOfThoughtRequiresFreeMediaAndWhyFreeMedia
Cheers.
