I’m not sure but the mandatory arbitration lindell himself put in said to pay the guy, so it was as rigged as lindell could get it without it being illegal, and they still felt it was well-proven, and lindell should pay.

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 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