That seems very likely. My point wasn't to say that they were looking to make a revolutionary tool to fight a state, more that it makes me sad that the ones that catch on are rarely open source ones that have existed.
hence why you either go GPLv3 or don't bother calling it open source.
Financing open-source projects is hard because anybody can take them and build stuff on top of them to sell at a way higher margin (or they are restrictive i.e. AGPL so nobody builds anything on top of them)
Only well-financed major open source projects are the ones that existed at critical points of time where no strong proprietary alternative with abundant features existed (e.g. Linux kernel, GCC, Apache Web Server) or the ones that are created by major companies as part of their infrastructure and released as a way to shape markets (e.g. Kubernetes, Chromium, PyTorch, React, .NET Core) for the worse or the better.