I hate to be the one naysayer, but it seems to me like the benefits of this influx of funding and scope has very few tangible benefits, while predisposing them to a standard failure mode of large and well-funded tech activist organisations where the means (the organisation) are confused for and eventually put ahead of whatever goal they were founded for: see e.g. Mozilla support for EME, the continuing negative news pertaining to Pocket and trying to collect user data. (On the ground, part of the problem may be something of the form: imagine you are the CEO of $foundation, are employing dozens of people and hundreds of volunteers who you have to keep motivated and now you are supposed to tell them they can't do the one thing that might keep their employer going and relevant just because of some philosophical considerations about how compatible it is with the core mission.)
Mozilla has been doing a lot of awesome stuff and people keep forgetting that their direct competition and threat are Google, Apple and Microsoft, the world's largest tech companies. Mozilla basically had no choice with EME, but to comply.
When the majority of HN's userbase has been using Chrome for years, power users, nay, freaking developers which should know what EME means, when Chrome is approaching the monopoly of IExplorer, good luck selling your values to the general public, who don't give a shit as long as their Netflix stream ain't working.
Open Whisper Systems has been delivering the best encrypted chat protocol to the masses, their tech being used now in WhatsApp for example.
So you can be the naysayer, but IMO these foundations are building and releasing products with a measurable positive impact on the world, whereas most of us here don't ;-)
I understand the case in the case of Mozilla, because a browser is an intrinsically absurdly complex product. In the case of Signal, the benefits of having a foundation like that seem unclear to me. What exactly is it that they want to do but couldn't before they had a $50m foundation? The linked page seems very vague about this.
