Given the loss of a webmaster, limited funding, and a very lean team at the moment, I’m more interested in Whonix community support of Whonix.
People only need look at commits to see there are only a handful who consistently contribute right now to code. A few only contribute to the wiki etc.
I’m not sure why the Whonix community is not standing up and supporting the platform they love and use daily. Particularly when the main contributors busted their balls in recent times, running the project on the smell of an oily rag and tons of free effort.
It’s a big disappointment when you look by comparison at how vibrant the contributions are over at Qubes or the Tor Project.
It really poses some interesting questions:
- Why aren’t coders interested in digging into Whonix stuff?
- Wiki edits and contributions are relatively simple. What stops people tapping on their keyboards?
- There is definitely significant expertise in the community, but the efforts seem fragmented in side projects or separate privacy guides etc, instead of doing it within the Whonix project. Why aren’t these guides/coding efforts contributed directly into the wiki, Whonix commits etc. instead?
If Whonix had the manpower to plough through issues/bugs at the rate you see on Qubes github or Tor trac - fully supported by the community - it would have already been fully-featured with all the bells and whistles that people keep querying in the forums here and there over the years, instead of lots of manual fiddling that is required.
It is not an ideal model in the long-term, and the community needs to man up, or stop whinging when their latest anonymity network or protocol doesn’t play nicely with Whonix, without a lot of configuration.