Tor Project 2008 Tax Return Now Online

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:32 PM, Julie C <julie at h-ck.ca> wrote:
> The larger threat that I see is the Tor Project is absolutely ... dare I say
> it? ... PATHETIC AT MARKETING ITSELF.
> Something has been bugging me the last couple days about the bigger picture
> of the funding issue that came to light with the cryptome posting a couple
> days ago. It became clearer to me today as I was driving through my
> neighbourhood (yes, I am a Canadian) - only $500,000 in funding for all of
> 2008 for the Tor Project?!
[snip]

This is neither fair nor reasonable.

When Wikimedia broke into the top _10_ most popular sites, with
something like 100 million unique viewers in a month the annual income
was comparable to the tor project. It only broke 1m in fundraising at
the very end of 2007. It takes time to scale up an organization so
that it is able to spend large amounts of money in an efficient and
responsible way.

The Free Software Foundation 2008 990 reflects 1m in income and the
FSF has been around for 25 years and supports many initiatives.

Mozilla Foundation's 2008 990 reflects 1.2m in income (this isn't the
whole story, Mozilla's finances are greatly complicated).

> Good grief, my neighbourhood homeless shelter gets 5 times that much funding
> each year. And there are likely 15 shelters in my city that get that much or
> more - per year. And this is in just 1 city in 1 country!
[snip]

I'm sure if I looked around I could find some initiative to give
blankets to kittens which raises more than all the orgs I've mentioned
combined, people allocate their charity in weird ways... and it's
isn't like homeless shelters are unreasonable things to support.

But more importantly, all of these orgs are growing. I expect that
they couldn't efficiently use all they could possible bring in, and
people are still coming to terms with the idea that software projects
can be deserving charities. "Software... thats the stuff that made
that Bill kid one of the richest people in the world, right?"

So cut the Tor folks a little slack, and if you see a way that you can
make a real contribution to improving the situation then speak up.
Everyone is a master fundraiser in their own mind.
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