Our philosophy: Principled Software

We build what we like to call “principled software.” We think these things are important:

• Craftsmanship—We try to do the best we can with the resources that we have.
• Honesty—We’ll always be honest to you in our dealings. We tell the truth, and won’t try to trick you.
• Improvement—Everything we build is to make the world a better place, not just to make a profit.
• Respect—Everyone is welcome, no matter what you look like, where you were born, who you love, or what you do for a living.
• Privacy—We keep your data safe and don’t share it with others. Our privacy policy clearly lists our promises to you.

Hey, that spells CHIRP.

Then how do we make money, you ask?

Those principles mean that most of the ways that internet services make money are off the table.

• Not advertisements—They’re tacky and annoying, and typically used to track you. We’d only use them if we could do so in a respectful way, and that hasn’t happened yet.
• Not selling your data—No way. Never.
• Not by sneaking stuff in—Companies like to offer us money to include their products, like browser addons that track the sites you visit, in our downloads. We always firmly turn down those offers.

So right now, we don’t, really. Green Eclipse is a volunteer operation: we cover the costs of running things ourselves, and don’t get paid for our time. Occasionally people do kindly send us a donation. In the future, we think that exploring the “freemium” model is best: we can continue to offer things free to the world, and then offer premium features to those who pay a small fee to offset the cost of the free services. Then maybe this could be our day job.

Get in touch

If you have any other questions, or feel that we could better live up to these values, get in touch with us.