Well, that didn’t take long.
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Only 130 years too late…
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Welp. Any BBers who use Pale Moon, you may want to reconsider that.
We’ll be shutting down Patreon for supporting the development of Pale Moon, UXP, Basilisk and related projects this month. We kindly ask all patrons to stop their patronage there and instead use the PayPal button on the Pale Moon home page to directly provide donations - this now also includes an option for recurring donations arranged automatically through PayPal. You don’t need a PayPal account, you can use any supported credit or debit card directly as well.
What happened?
Today, I received a notification from Patreon in my inbox talking about the on-going political issues around racism, and proudly stating Patreon as a company will be donating/has donated a large sum of money to Black Lives Matter and “other organizations on the front line”. It also talks about increasing payments specifically for “people identifying as persons of color” and setting aside another large sum to specifically pay out to that group of creators (creating inverse bias).
This is something I can’t agree with personally, and don’t want our page (and in turn your donations – after all this is all coming out of the margin Patreon takes from your support!) to attribute to any sort of political agenda and racism, whether against blacks or the inverse against others by prioritizing any group over another. We also do not want your donations to implicitly contribute to the opportunistic, aggressive driving forces that have the United States currently in chaos in many states, nor any other political or extremist organization. Your support should benefit the projects in a neutral fashion.
Unfortunately, Patreon has clearly chosen to take sides and we can no longer use this service in the unbiased fashion any creative support organization should be. Creativity has no race, no ethnicity, and no political bias for or against any particular group. Patreon no longer represents the entire creative community by making this a specific goal, and I do not feel comfortable continuing to use this service knowing the disagreeable use of part of our patron’s donations.
As such, we fall back to a truly neutral solution: a global payment processor and electronic money provider that does not use its clients to influence the political/social sphere.
To clarify: we do not support nor condemn BLM or any other organization currently active in the social sphere as a whole, but rather we do not want to be involved with, affiliated with, or indirectly support such organizations with your donation money without you having a say in it. We do not take sides in this argument. Your support should be used for the development and maintenance of our software and surrounding services, not for some ulterior other purpose, which is why we’re taking this step now to end our involvement with Patreon.
God am I tired of self-righteous pro-status quo “meritocracy” open source techbros.
I’m also absolutely losing it at the idea that this guy considers PayPal to be a “neutral” payment processor.
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I changed to Waterfox a while back. I was getting a far-right feeling from vocal parts of the Pale Moon community, so I’m not surprised by this.
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Someone should send this to their founder, just to watch his head explode.
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Well, I guess now we know why they named their company that, don’t we…
Right?
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https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=24606
The developer’s arguments and their replies to a poster on the forum sound extremely weak tea as far as i’m concerned but to then go on and hold up paypal as an ethical organisation of minority rights is laughable. There’s nothing neutral or apolitical about this decision, by doing this they are absolutely making a political point that black lives do not matter to them and it sends a message they are supporting police brutality, authoritarianism and diminishing activist causes to stop… y’know, people being brutally murdered daily. It just seems to be they’ve fallen for the propaganda and agitators from the far right, telling us they have best friends who are black doesn’t absolve them (the bit they put in parentheses here leaves me puzzled, why feel the need to qualify that?).
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