We gave up writing grant proposals. After repeatedly pouring hours into crafting proposals exactly as specified, the big one (no plural) OTF (.gov funding) has never responded. The smaller, more informal ones aren't interested as well (no clue why).
What little OTF money there is goes to the same projects, written by the same grant writers. We're told by insiders that we need connections, need to hire those writers, and we're told we need a sexier story.
We can't fund a modest income for the lead developer (approaching nearly a decade). He lives cheaply in a developing country off anonymous donations of unpredictable amount and timing.
Tor has resources we couldn't dream of, and if they're cutting staff, there's no hope for any open source security project.
The thing is: When you're the kind of person that is able to amass m-/billions, you're unlikely to be very altruistic. Most of these people had to, excuse my language, fuck over people (workers, customers, investors, the larger public) along the way in various ways. You simply can't be a billionaire without some kind of severe exploitation and it is unlikely that, when you have no qualms doing so in one area, it is unlikely you care about people's livelihoods etc. in other areas (there are some exceptions ofc, Bill Gates comes to mind). Jeff Bezos is a perfect example: The richest person on earth has donated what amounts to a few cents for an ordinary person but with great public fanfare. Not even during the COVID-19 pandemic, he views it as necessary (cf. with Jack Dorsey, donating 1/3 of his wealth).
He shifted 1/3 of his Square shares to an LLC. So far, that LLC has donated a little over 7 million.
I'd argue that Bill Gates is regretting his previous actions and trying to fix his "karma" in his retirement. He was just as bad as the rest of them.
Also a large portion of craigslist here was just the personals section - once that was shut down there is basically no good reason to use it anymore, as it simply doesn't have the network effect / critical mass of users to sustain itself. The remaining users all seem to be work-related scams of some kind (probably automated) and drug dealers (probably cops).
https://fossbytes.com/tor-honeypot-how-to-hack-the-true-iden...
I would imagine that a project of that importance deserves to be able to be self-sufficient. A US$2M budget/year is not that much, (m|b)illionaires making their money from the Internet could easily sponsor the project.
Better yet, having grass-root sponsorship is even more important. Maybe they need marketing help more than anything else?