- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Just sitting here waiting on the peeps who know more about stuff to chime in on this, cause it sounds awesome. But I’ve been burned before so I’m hesitant
Seems solid.
It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”
If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse
What is this buying out talked about something not escapable if not some legal reorganization is made? It has been being talked about other companies, too, and it sounds like if you have a form of a company, you can’t legally refuse monetary offers from someone to buy your company.
Is there such a legal mechanism that forces an owner to sell out if an offer is made, or is this more about proofing a company against CEO/shareholder personal sell out decision?
A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.
You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.
When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.
Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.
Seems legit. Going towards a better business model. Don’t know if anything stops them going from non-profit to profit as OpenAI did buy at least their movinf the other way now with intent towards the opposite.
I’ll keep using their service at least.
Don’t know if anything stops them going from non-profit to profit as OpenAI
Don’t know about other countries but that’s illegal in the US and not what happened.
Much like Mozilla and RPi, they have a for-profit and a non-profit arm.
Which is the same structure that Proton is moving to.
Fair honestly, I’m more or less in the same boat 😅
Seems like all that will change is the fact that all profits made will be reinvested in the company, im not an expert though, so i may be wrong
Well that’s cool:). Remove the profit motive/surplus goes a long way to slow down evil.
Proton will still be a for-profit company that will be majority-controlled by a non-profit. The non-profit will not own all of the business either, so there will still be profits going to shareholders.
This makes me want to upgrade my plan.
I’ve got the unlimited plan and it’s well worth the money. Simplelogin integration is great.
I wish the forwarding with email aliases would function a bit differently. Right now the alias is set as the recipient in the email and I wish you could set the recipient email to whatever email you want (like one of the additional emails you can set in Proton Mail) because the way it is now it makes my general filters useless and I would have to add even more filters.
Edit: I created a suggestions on their feedback site here: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/953584-proton-pass/suggestions/48496442-show-use-forwards-to-email-as-recipient-in-forwa if anyone cares to vote for it.
That’s a good point - voting for it!
For my purposes I have a second proton email for things I may want to keep credentials for which I filter out, and the simple logins are almost always complete burners so I end up deleting half of them anyway. The moment I start getting unwanted spam I touch the simple login accounts and start making new ones.
As someone with many hobbies I get things from all sorts of sites so it’s just kind of necessary if I don’t want to drown in spam lol
I upgraded mine but haven’t talked to the wife about including her yet because the family plan is for up to 6 so it’d be cheaper to just buy two individual subscriptions, she doesn’t really care enough to justify that much extra cost. Hopefully Proton adds another plan or two for groups!
In this world of enshittification and organizations becoming more and more aggressive, it’s so nice and refreshing to see proton doing the opposite and moving to a better model :)
I think proton was never going to function as a profit-first business. Too many enshittified rival businesses. Kinda the natural outcome.
I was this close to upgrade to the paid plan, and this is the final push I needed
Proton and Mullvad leading the way
Except Mullvad VPN is better for privacy.
Support the apps that protect you. I recommend Signal and Proton VPN.
I recommend mullvad
At my school, mullvad is one of the only VPNs that work since basically every port is blocked except ports 80 and 443 using TCP. Mullvad can use wireguard over TCP on 443, which is very useful.
