Moxie Marlinspike, one of the main developers of the Signal secure communications application, has announced that the Signal Foundation has been founded. It’ll be listed as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and Marlinspike expects that the move will allow the platform and its implementations in other services, such as WhatsApp, to grow and improve. The Signal Foundation has started off on the right footing, being awarded $50 million in funding.
In the announcement, Marlinspike said:
“We’re glad those are the choices we’ve made. Today, we are launching the Signal Foundation, an emerging 501(c)(3) nonprofit created and made possible by Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous. In case you missed it, Brian left WhatsApp and Facebook last year, and has been thinking about how to best focus his future time and energy on building nonprofit technology for public good.
Starting with an initial $50,000,000 in funding, we can now increase the size of our team, our capacity, and our ambitions. This means reduced uncertainty on the path to sustainability, and the strengthening of our long-term goals and values. Perhaps most significantly, the addition of Brian brings an incredible talented engineer and visionary with decades of experience building successful products to our team.”
With all the additional funding, Signal will now get more eyes on its code in order to fix issues that could compromise users, and the development team will be able to further improve the Signal app. It’s worth noting at this point that Signal is hiring; they’re looking for a server developer, Android developer, desktop developer (web developer), a designer, and an iOS developer.
Source: Signal