The point is to help a service gain market shares and displace at least a little Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, and limit the inpact of having only US companies in that field.

Email is a bit overlooked, but it's huge source of information, easy to obtain (with the appropriate laws), and quite good in term of quality. It renders email strategic.

With a grant to an oss project, it's not achieving directly this goal. And the bettering of the oss ecosystem is not likely to help an alternative service hugely.

Lastly, a mail server is probably one of the most annoying common piece of infrastructure to deploy. To the point that even people knowing how don't even bother.

European HNers with an established company, you should look into this, getting a grant is not as hard as it seems and there are companies that can help you prepare your proposal (even for free, check you local government programs)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_Programmes_for_Resea...

Looks like they've been awarded the funds under the SME instrument phase 2, which is about providing grant funding for a variety of innovative business ideas, and generally intended to help existing businesses bring new products to market. You can see the exact details of the Proton project here: https://sme.easme-web.eu/?b=911075023

The point is, there's nothing specifically wrong about offering grants to companies who develop closed-source software, in the same way there's nothing wrong with offering grants to other companies who don't produce software at all. My company—building a hardware project—has also just been awarded funding under the same programme (I can reassure you that they did indeed research throughly!). Much of the business case for grant investments is the idea that offering funding to SMEs can be an overall economic benefit if it allows them to produce products or services that they wouldn't otherwise be able to offer. Given the rather more cautious private funding environment in Europe, it can be hard to otherwise come by some of these opportunities.

That's not to say that funding for open-source projects isn't a great thing, and I hope more of that continues to be made. The grants you refer to were made as part of FOSSA I think? It's done with different intent, but I reckon both are valuable.

If they are worried about the dominance of Google et all then they could look at taxes and regulatory changes to shift the balance.

Bringing it up in comparison for no reason and just general being hostile to MS is the reason MS doesn't listen to non-enterprise feedback. They have their faults but people like you are the ones who don't let them improve. For you, it's not about technology- its about your personal grudges.

And it's not that the founders chose a Swiss structure because they were themselves Swiss. Even the product were hypothetically bug-free and fully FOSS ... the marketing (with its mountains in the background and "Secure Email Based in Switzerland" tagline) plays to the sentiment that a Swiss jurisdiction makes Protonmail a safer bet than other location is itself "snakeoil" ... if I think about this for too long I might even wonder about their much more relevant claims regarding security & actual code implementation.

Switzerland's data protection laws are way behind the GDPR. Switzerland is struggling to adapt its data protection laws to keep its adequacy status with the EU. It has still not signed Convention 108.

Switzerland's surveillance system is growing and growing. The latest revision of the relevant law was targeted at services like ProtonMail and ProtonVPN (Federal Act on the Surveillance of Post and Telecommunications). Switzerland's federal secret service has got almost unlimited power without any meaningful control and is known as a close partner of the US (thanks to Snowden leaks). Every communication in Switzerland is under mass surveillance 24/7, the metadata is stored for at least six months (civil security authorities) or longer (secret services). Switzerland's armed forces work in close cooperation with NATO.

I am actually wondering whether Proton is a honeypot.

You don't have to take our word for this, it's actually in the text of the law.

Also, if you read the actual text of the US/Switzerland MLAT (mutual lateral assistance treaty), or the text of the Swiss Data Protection Act, you will see that "unlimited power without any meaningful control" is also patently untrue, and there are many layers of control and an explicit need to satisfy the requirements of Swiss privacy laws, even on cases originating from the US.

Isn't it more true of e.g., German-based companies and less true of Swiss-based ones?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-secrecy/era-of-bank...

That being said Outlook would have probably been a better comparison and the statement would have lost no impact, Microsoft is just the easiest proprietary software giant to point at.

Are they really so shallow?

If they don't listen to non-enterprise feedback, that can only be because they don't give a fuck due to them having a monopoly.

Also blaming people on the Internet for Microsoft not listening is extremely rude.

But even if it were true, how is it any of our concern? Personally I couldn't care less about the way Microsoft chooses to conduct its business.

The only reason I don't use them is because to get the full experience (IMAP, especially) I need to pay them... Now I have to pay them, and I don't even get to enjoy the product. Thanks EU! :P