Give’s mission is to democratize generosity. That means that the advocacy of prejudice, racial intolerance, or violence is antithetical to our mission.
Give has always been about making it free and easy for organizations and individuals throughout the world to accept online donations. Anyone who wants to access our platform can because it is open source and available publicly through the plugin directory on WordPress.org and Github. This enables individuals, organizations, and causes throughout the world to easily start fundraising with a low barrier to entry. Unfortunately, it also means objectionable groups such as those that spread hate and intolerance can as well.
GiveWP and our parent company Impress.org, LLC. fully embraces the open source philosophy and understands that a necessary consequence of that philosophy includes that our free and open source code can be used in ways that we cannot control or predict. However, we reserve the right to refuse our services (our licensing, priority support, and any affiliated services) to any organization at our sole discretion. Part of our mission of Democratizing Generosity is to ensure that our services are never used in a way that would promote hate, violence, or racial intolerance.
It was recently brought to our attention that we had one or more customers who promote hate and intolerance. We have since emailed said customers to inform them that their money has been refunded and services terminated. Due to the open source nature of our product we naturally do not have the ability to restrict the usage of our code on their website in any way. But they will no longer be able to access our priority support, get updates to our code from us, or connect through any of our affiliated services. Let it be known that we do not include any tracking beacons, backdoors, or other access mechanisms to turn off, disable, or alter our plugins remotely in any way.
We remain committed to our privacy policy and do not share sensitive information about our customers with outside parties. Finally, our primary objective is the democratization of generosity. We cannot pursue that objective successfully when our services enable hate, discrimination, or violence of any form.
If you have any questions or concerns feel free to reach out to me directly.
Thank you.
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