I received the following email this morning:

To the Founder of Privacy Browser,

Greetings to Arizona! I’m Charlie, the founder of Appflip – A Broker for mobile apps that helps communications app owners sell their app for a maximum exit value. My team flagged Privacy Browser because of your 4,2 star rating and your 312 reviews on the US Play Store – very impressive.

We’ve helped multiple owners exit their app for a value they are happy with.

We’ve had founders close a deal for their app within 1 month of our initial call with them.

Are you free for a quick call this week to discuss this further?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

—

Charlie Ryan – Founder of Appflip

There have been a few good open source projects that have done this, a recent example being Audacity. Every open source project eventually has to transition away from the founder. My plan is that, as Privacy Browser grows bigger, I will hire a core team of open source developers to work on it full time. As I work with that group I will come to know them, their wisdom, and their commitment to the open source movement and what Privacy Browser is attempting to accomplish. When it comes time for me to retire, I will hand the reins to a person or group of people from this development pool that have proven themselves to have the users’ best privacy interests at heart.

If for some reason I am not able to identify a person or group of people who I feel would be good stewards of Privacy Browser, I will move the source code repositories to a platform like GitLab. Those interested in continuing the work can fork it and individual users can pick whichever fork they consider to best continue the original project.

Of course, at any point, anyone willing to comply with the requirements of the GPLv3+ license can fork the code and make a competitor. If anyone is able to do so and better meet users’ needs they deserve to gain a following. However, as long as Stoutner remains true to its stated values, I would expect that other developers will feel inclined to submit their code directly to the parent project.