we are excited [to have purchased the development team for] skiff… and will be shutting down thr skiff suite [so developers can work on notion]”

@Rookwood @testeronious

Tuta seems to be driven by idealists and privacy activists as well. AFAIK, they also don't have venture capital and their user base of paying users is what keeps them alive. Which is also why it's still a small company.

I don't recall how Tuta got their initial funding to get startet. I don't think they were crowdfunded in the same way Proton did.

But the idealsism goals of both Tuta and Proton is what generally makes it less likely they will sell out.

AFAIR, Skiff was VC funded. The idealism of the founders are easily ignored when the VC backing wants to cash in on their investments. And that's what happened here, in some way or another.

It sucks but it's so hard to convince anyone to pick a private email to begin with. Maybe proton becomes the go to private and gets big enough to make people focus on private solutions that allows more competitors later on.

I almost agree but there are more options for private mail than Proton and Tuta. You can also use Fastmail, mailbox.org, Disroot, or Forward Mail. There are even more options. But as the Proton CEO said, you can never be certain that a company won't be bought up for enough money at some point.

I honestly have no idea why Skiff would be interesting for Notion. From what I can grasp the only Notion features overlap are Skiff Pages and perhaps Skiff Calendar.

Companies acquire other companies all the time. Notion surely thinks they can use something controlled by Skiff to make more money than by using its money another way. I expect Notion will use the acquisition of Skiff to start offering new services or improve their existing services in an attempt to increase their market share. They don't need to have similar preexisting services or products in order to do that, and there is surely information we don't know that influenced Notion's decision (e.g. a new product developed in secret that was only disclosed due to Skiff's interest in being acquired).

Proton isn’t science

Cryptography and software development is science.

Yeah, I read that as “we haven’t been offered enough money to retire to a private island on huge yachts yet, but we’re not closing any doors”