If that's nothing to you, I'd be happy to accept the equivalent in American dollars (Which is $12.90 at the moment according to a conversion tool I just looked searched for). I have prescriptions I'm going to have to put off refilling (Nothing I can't survive without, just stuff I'll be more uncomfortable without or having to take less of to stretch my supply). That would get me to about where I need to be on those to not have to skip some days before I can afford to refill them or break some tablets in half and take less per day to make them last until the date already expected money comes in.Octopuss wrote:I've been unemployed for a long time and still could "afford" to donate twice. €10 is nothing to nobody.
I'm not seriously asking for your money. I'm just saying, €10 or $10 is less than I have in my wallet or bank account right now. It's not nothing to nobody. It's nothing to certain classes of people.
I would imagine that you must either having savings, be getting unemployment benefits that are better than one might expect because your country offers a nicer social safety net or because they are based on your previous salary in some way (Say, a percentage of), be getting other benefits that are good, have a partner or a spouse, have stuff you owned coming into this situation that's keeping you around, etc.. Why? Because money doesn't literally grow on trees. Nor have I ever seen a $10 bill or a €10 note just floating through the breeze (Granted, I've never been to England, so the latter would be unlikely even if the former weren't).
I'm not really trying to get into your business, I'm just saying that some people who are admittedly having some economic hardship, as you are, may assume there is nothing worse because they haven't ever experienced it or seen the experience. Even me, who it sounds like has it worse than you, at least is sitting in a room with a roof and typing on a laptop. There are homeless people who don't have rooves or laptops. And the poor in third-world countries often have it worse than the poor in first-world countries. And even for the homeless poor in third world countries, some might be relatively healthy and have gotten a free food handout that day, and some might have 6 horrific diseases and be in a state of starvation with a race to see which will kill him and the likelihood that one will before the end of the day. Some of those poor might have a jacket to ward off a little of the cold, or a hat to keep off a little of the hot sun, and others may not have those things.
I would say that it's sort of a given that no matter how bad you have it, there is probably someone who has it worse. Unless you are a blind, deaf, and a quadriplegic all at once. I would say people with all of those things going on are probably in the worse possible life circumstances I can conceive of. Maybe I lack imagination, though. I am sure there is a bottom rung, but I would say that it's far lower than you're on, then I'm on, or maybe even than the two of us could think up if we spent an hour brainstorming about what the worst possible circumstances are.
It'd be nice if our nations and other nations adopted a national basic minimum income with no strings. Then we could probably say that everyone in them would really have at least x dollars or pounds or Euros or whatever. Although, even then, that payment would come in like once a month or something, and so at any given time, they may not have that amount. Also, they may need it immediately to go to rent or food or something and then have to sit tight until the next one- so it could be unrealistic for them to use it as a donation.
Also, ultimately, if are below the poverty line and do find yourself somehow figuring out how to squeeze out $10-$20 or whatever, a lot of times it goes to something you'll enjoy because you're a human being and need a little joy so you don't get suicidal or whatever.
Now, moving this back to Pale Moon, I would guess that users of this project on average have enough income to chip in $10 or €10 occasionally. On average. Not every user. And I would imagine, because I am going to assume that MoonChild is a good kind generous person, that there would be some who just could who he'd say "Nah, you need it more than me" if he knew their exact circumstances and they asked him.
I think it's a good thing to donate to these projects. You know, MoonChild does hard work. He deserves to be paid. What I kind of object to is just when it's like "Hey, everyone can afford to do this" or "People who use the browser and don't do this are freedloading jerks" (And, right now, I'm not even arguably freeloading as I don't have Pale Moon installed currently. I come here for the conversation and because I remain curious as to how the project is going after so many years of using Pale Moon and knowing that I might switch back in the future depending on what's out there). Why? Because in the first place, I don't agree that *everyone* can afford to donate without extreme sacrifice (A lot of people, sure), and, ultimately, if one as a developer or company owner chooses to embrace an open-source or free as in freedom software model and a free as in beer distribution model, some people will choose to use them for free. That's a choice that was made with this project and others like it. A proprietary browser that charges per user on a subscription or buy one-time basis is not something that is strictly speaking impossible to have exist, it just probably would have such a small user base that the payments would be less than donations from a larger userbase one would get by doing something like PM does.
Even if you go to an open-source but not free as in beer model, even there, there could be an alternative browser that features everything but the artwork and the name, and releases on a slight delay as the code is released. An almost identical Pale Moon clone called Red Planet or whatever. Sort of like what CentOS is relative to RedHat. So, one would be paid for every copy of Pale Moon, but many who didn't want to (or couldn't) donate and thus probably won't pay would switch to this hypothetical Red Planet value. That's a sort of pitfall of charging for open-source software.
And, it's hard to really call another browser being able to make use of open-source portions of a browser's code unfair, because it's probably how the initial browser came into being in the first place. Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. Blink, the engine that powers Chrome, came from Webkit, which came from the browser engine that powered a semi-obscure browser that was packaged with or developed as part the KDE environment for Linux (KBrowser? KHTML? I don't know, all of their stuff used to start with the letter K, though.
). Safari runs on Webkit, and is thus ultimately built on the work of others outside of Apple, or was at the beginning (Basically the same series of events as Chrome, but without the Webkit to Blink step, obviously). Even Firefox came from somewhere- when Netscape Navigator was starting to lose ground and I think some saw the end coming, the company open-sourced a lot of it's code, which became the first Mozilla browser (None of that code is left in Firefox today, but that's where it started). Off the top of my head, the only browsers I can think of that probably truly started from scratch are the proprietary Microsoft ones- Internet Explorer and Edge- and obviously a lot of money was put into that effort, and even there, Microsoft has opted to use Webkit/Blink (Not sure which) as the engine for it's Android version of Edge, it's only the Windows versions of the browsers that really were arguably developed by the company from literally nothing.And there's nothing wrong with any of those browser building on other browsers, because at some point a choice was made to open-source them, or portions of them, and that was freely made, and so you can take what is offered without guilt, the cost is simply that you must publish the code and allow others to take the work you add to (or modify from) other people's work and use it for a competing project, just as you've done (Interestingly, if they make cool changes, you can then integrate them into your browser from whence their browser originally came, if your code hasn't drifted so far as to no longer be compatible). Actually, it's kind of cool, because it allows there to be a ton of different browsers in the world. I doubt anyone except a really big corporation could really code a complete browser including the engine, the UI, the platform code, the application code, all the code from scratch that would work with today's Internet- and even the big corporations are all passing in favor of at least some open-source, because the cost of starting fresh would be off the scale. I doubt Microsoft even built Edge for Windows from scratch- I'm not sure, but my guess would be that it wasn't built from scratch- no open-source components in Edge that I know of and it doesn't really resemble Internet Explorer that closely, but my guess would be they took something from IE, Windows Explorer, or some other part Windows or whatever and then started trimming and building out (Which they can do, because they own all those things).
Without open-source, if everyone had to start from scratch tomorrow and all the browsers and browser code disappeared magically never to be recoverd, there would be no browser diversity at all. You might get three- one Apple, one Microsoft, and one Google. And they might have to simplify the modern Internet for a while because it'd take them a long time to build browsers truly capable of handling it, there would likely be simpler betas for years while they built browsers back up to speed. Actually, in such an obviously hypothetical situation (Because it involves magic disappearance of things that there are copies of on billions or trillions of PCs spread around the world, some in shielded facilities, etc..), a more likely reaction would be for the aforementioned big three to not even build three truly separate browsers, but to pool resources and build essentially the core of one browser together, with each then specializing it on their own to meet their specific goals (Sort of like open-source, but not necessarily actually open-source, it could just be a contract between three companies to share ownership of the base code for a while, but not open to companies not in the pact forking).
