You do realize charitable giving represents hundreds of billions of revenue for non-profits every year ? - and that's excluding religious donations which are likely to represent an even larger amount.

You can downvote all you want, but you are missing the point.

Is Whisper Systems a charity, non-profit or a commercial entity? If it's either of first two, then it would've only make sense to say just that in the About section, because it would alleviate all questions of why their products are free. However if it's a commercial entity, the question remains - how do they plan on making money? And donations is a silly answer. They are a nice bonus, but as any goodwill gestures they are an unsustainable and unpredictable source of money unless there are dedicated people managing it, e.g. organizing fundraisers, campaigns and such. I don't think WS is doing any of this.

Whisper Systems no longer exists. Open Whisper Systems is a project, not a company. It's not a commercial entity. There is no profit model, no business plan, nothing. It is free, open source, donationware (in both money for devs and dev time). The people directing it are well known and have repeatedly shown themselves to be very switched on. All code is open to audit.

See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_Systems

There's no need to be so cynical with this lot.

There are approximately 1.1 million public charities in the US that'd disagree with you.

It is for Wikipedia. Otherwise no open source project has a "business model".