I run Seti@home to be part of the help to find extratrestial life in the universe. My views on this is that it is a great idea to have odernary people helping the search.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.