Comment by grapheneos

> suspicious sponsors

GrapheneOS is entirely funded by donations. It doesn't accept strings attached sponsorships. We list companies sponsoring infrastructure for GrapheneOS on our website to encourage more companies to make donations and for transparency.

https://grapheneos.org/sponsors

Which of these companies do you claim is suspicious and what's the reasoning for that? Server sponsorships are how many Linux distributions including Alpine, Arch and Debian host their update mirrors and other infrastructure.

> force users into opaque hardware

Computer hardware and firmware is nearly universally closed source. The devices we currently support are among the most open including using Trusty OS for the TEE and secure core, OpenTitan as the basis for the secure element and littlekernel for the late stage boot chain on the main SoC.

GrapheneOS is coming to more devices but those devices need to meet our hardware security and requirements and provide the driver/firmware updates we need. We have a partnership with Motorola Mobility that's working towards new devices meeting our requirements with official GrapheneOS support.

> just the other day they were also promoting the usage of government sponsored VPNs

This is utter nonsense. Answering people's questions about how to use Tor on GrapheneOS is not promoting government sponsored VPNs. We don't even specifically promote Tor but rather explain how to use it. We also recommend people carefully consider using it to access the public internet via exit nodes since it makes people using it into targets and anyone can host an exit node.