> I mentioned "free" only to point out that there is no financial cost
> to switching to it. I guess I did not type the sentence with enough
> care; words are missing. My apologies.

It speaks highly of your character that you say this to the jerk on the
internet said you were full of shit.

> But I'm also wondering why this bothered you so much.

Because crypto is important. A lot of harmful attitudes/mindsets are
reinforced if people think NaCl was created in the authors spare time
and did not require funding:

- "Why should I donate to GnuPG/OpenSSL/Tor/Mozilla(NSS)? Those NaCl
devs wrote NaCl for free."

- "How hard could it be to implement a crypto library? Nacl was a side project. The Nacl devs 'have day jobs in
academia' and created nacl in their spare time. They did it for free, so they obviously didn't need to spend money on
testing environment, research material or hire/consult experts. On the other hand look at SelfiesMadeEa.sy they
raised serious cash and had to quit their jobs because they tackle hard problems."

- "Obama and the rest of gubmint are taxing me to death. Government should be pay for the military and maybe some
roads; not waste money on liberal academics in ivory towers, maplethorpe and those pinkos from NEA or some stupid
robot/telescope that cant do metric conversions."

- "OMG NSA is evil. USA does nothing but invade countries and privacy."

> Does it make a difference that grants were received?

No it does not make a (negative/harmful) difference that grants were received. I think it is a shining example of
modern civil society; you have the US, NL and the EU teaming up to fund strong crypto by top notch folks from a
number of countries. Governments should fund research, applied and basic, and they should be encouraged to fund
more of it.

Somewhat tangential: Knowledge of the grants also seeks to eliminate the
idiocy in the latter two examples above. People need to be reminded that
big government is not always an evil force, governments can be a force
for good. I do not know if you saw my other comment about tor funding
but tor had revenue of \$2+ million in 2012 and 60% came from US
government. I don't know where you are from but I bet you have met a
simple minded moron wearing a tea party costume or trendy European
threads that will not stop complaining about the evil Obama surveillance
administration. Blow their minds and ask them to wrap their heads around
the:

- $800k from DoD for "Basic and Applied Research and Development in
Areas Relating to the Navy Command, Control, Communications,
Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance"

or

- $350k from State for "Programs to Support Democracy, Human Rights
and Labor" and "New America Foundation: International Programs to
Support Democracy, Human Rights"

> Is the funding not transparent enough?

If this is in regards to the lack of numbers from NWO or the EU I am
sure that I am at fault. (I also think one of djb's EU grant numbers
might have a digit transposed) I imagine that the dutch version of
nwo.nl is easier to use.

> The blog article on OpenSSL mentions payments for consulting and
> "features" to be added to OpenSSL.

> Should I be concerned about what those features are, and who is paying
> for them? Are you concerned?

I think we should be concerned that OSF is not doing a better job
highlighting sponsors and attracting new ones. It should be easier for
someone with check writing authority at big.corp.com to stumble across
the sponsors information and think to themselves "hey, we should drop
some petty cash on these folks. We use the product and I bet the
marketing folks would appreciate the bump in visibility for a fraction
of the cost of our latest failed social network branding efforts." If I
was OSF I would look at the \$2 million tor brought in and ask myself
"maybe we could do a better job of sponsor outreach? Tor is important to
these people that wrote checks and tor uses libssl-dev, I wonder if
there is an opportunity?"