Proton is taking its privacy-first apps to a nonprofit foundation model

The new emerging hybrid model of non-profit foundations paired with for-profit businesses is certainly interesting, as it combines some "greater good" principles with the ability to build products and run businesses in a modern competitive market. I feel it may take some time to work out the details of these models. The biggest example we've seen is OpenAI, which, in my opinion, still hasn't solved this model and is torn between lucrative multibillion business opportunities and adherence to its founding principles.

Proton&#x27;s announcement was posted here (10 comments so far):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40704191">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40704191</a>

While still working on lots of stuff in their portfolio, I’ve been extremely pleased with their entire portfolio. They just continue to improve and have become a viable competitor to Google in all but the photos area, and they are working on that.

Hopefully this works better for Proton than it has for OpenAI or Mozilla, from a non-profit mission perspective.

Well this is only as strong as the makeup of the board! OpenAI has the same model.<p>&gt; Among other members of the Foundation&#x27;s board is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML, HTTP, and almost everything else about the web.<p>Well that&#x27;s good news!

Why aren&#x27;t cooperative business models more common among software companies? Starting a software company typically doesn&#x27;t require a large amount of capital, especially with open source projects where individual contributions can play a significant role. In these cases, a cooperative model could effectively distribute ownership among the contributors, essentially making them co-owners. This approach seems simpler than managing a hybrid of nonprofit and for-profit elements.

Get rid of SMS based anti-spam on signup to be a convincing privacy first<p>Find a different anti-spam measure

Since the title confused me: &quot;nonprofit foundation model&quot; = &quot;a business model based on a non-profit foundation&quot;, not &quot;a machine learning Foundation Model built on a non-profit basis&quot;.

By looking at the headline I thought Proton would be changing to become something like Mint Linux and not Ubuntu Linux. But then after reading the article, Proton looks more like Ubuntu with Canonical backing it.

[dupe]<p>More discussion on official post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40704191">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40704191</a>

Reminder that Proton is not &quot;private&quot;. They have all the keys, and willingly operate in a jurisdiction where they bend over backwards for ridiculous court orders.<p>From their own transparency page:<p>Number of legal orders: 6,378<p>Contested orders: 407<p>Orders complied with: 5,971<p>They did this to expose protestors and people who upset the powers that be, rarely real criminals.<p>They could choose to operate in a country that respects rights and design their tech so that there&#x27;s nothing valuable to hand over. This is what Mullvad did.<p>*Edit: HN has been overwhelmed with poor quality users and bots growing in the last few years. Same as reddit there are paid services used to manipulate voting. HN needs to migrate away from this in order for real discussions to return.