RE: "Charity Engine" Controversy
"We have creditors because we took on seed investment and loans to exist. This is totally normal for a tech startup."
Is it normal for a tech startup to increase their net liabilities by 20x over 6 years? Oh and since this company has existed for 10 years you're hardly a startup anymore yet your liabilities continue to grow, not diminish. The only place you seem to be earning any money is from investors overpaying for shares.
What this says to me is that you're not making a profit and trying to force something to exist that shouldn't.
"This has been a very hard and unrewarding mission: to bring millions of completely non-techie users to BOINC, by incentivising them with other means (supporting charity and the prizes). It has also meant finding paying customers to keep the whole thing running."
So you tell people you'll donate money to charity and give them prizes (which you do), but your prime motivation is to resell their computing power to corporations when able. So in reality you're attempting to make money off other people's hardware, which entails no costs to yourself, save for advertising. Pretty slick scheme to make yourselves some money, if it worked, but it doesn't it would appear. Basically you're trying to be GOLEM but with the bonus of being able to take a cut of any paying customers that exist. Seems pretty unnecessary to me.