free software resistance

 the cost of computing freedom is eternal vigilance

### theres-no-such-thing-as-a-small-business *originally posted:* jun 2023 *updated:* dec 2023 if youre looking for a critique of minifree you wont find it here, if i ever find something wrong with minifree i might indeed mention it but im not very concerned with leahs business-- on the contrary. if i could ride, drive, and/or walk to minifree to buy a stack of laptops i would. (i know, they do shipping too). whats more, id ask leah to autograph them like stallman has. if they could put a drive platter on their head and bless the laptops as well id accept, sadly the church of vim leases its chapel from github (like leah i prefer vi to emacs-- though i only use the bsd version, not vimicrosoft). ill settle for having leah write the firmware and installing openbsd (im perfectly capable of installing the os, but if doing so turns up any issues leah can fix or warn me about that might be worthwhile). it doesnt bother me that leah owns a business, and my critique of small businesses (which isnt really a critique of small businesses, other than stating why they dont exist) is no fault of minifree in particular-- its a critique of all businesses that minifree (or anyone else) can barely avoid in the first place. no one needs to tell me that businesses are part of contemporary life, i just went to one not two hours ago and gave them money in exchange for food. they didnt have any advantage on minifree, and im happy to give them my money-- its really not useful for anything but spending. leah is a capitalist, or at least, a small business owner. their politics bother me but their business and other work really dont. im eager to see a bunch of people pick up (sincerely) where stallman left off (and he absolutely did, 12 years ago and counting) and im very aware that most of the people picking up from there were never sincere about it. theyre opportunists-- nearly all of them. ive spent maybe a year scrutinising leahs take on all these things and while ill mention any concerns i have about that, overall i think leah is the next richard stallman. heres hoping. there are of course, differences-- not every difference is really important, and some things are improvements while other things... may be worthwhile tradeoffs. like stallman is "at least" left of leah in politics on some issues, but not in any way i consider significant . im not trying to make a bigger thing of this than it is. regardless, we shouldnt stop there. ive always said we need more people like this, plural. im not trying to make anyone #1 in a position that only one person can rank as, its not leahs fault or mine that theyre the only person worthy of that kind of rank for now. this point is actually part of what this page is intended to be about. but i do want to talk about the illusion of small businesses. wouldnt it be better to do business with someone more to the left? heres the thing, leah has no competition. theres no one i know of doing exactly the work theyre doing, and the work theyre doing MATTERS. its work id be happy to support. its work id be happy to recommend. should you do business with leah? absolutely, if you want the best laptop you can have (the best in my opinion). will this opinion change? its possible someone will either offer a better service or another really great and somehow comparable service in the future, i doubt as a libertarian thats a concept that bothers leah, and maybe they can even recommend a good business to buy from if you want a phone. for example, id never buy from puri.sm just because of some things leah said that i will not quote, but i sympathise entirely with what was said. so ive crossed that brand off any list of people i would do business with. i should also note it wasnt only leahs comments that convinced me, but it was leahs opinion that i put the most stock in. this isnt always true, but their opinion often matters to me. why dont small businesses exist? okay, lets look at minifree- i already said i wouldnt pick on them, though youll quickly see thats not what im getting at. minifree purchases and resells laptops- no problem. the service they perform is one of / the best service(s) i know of for getting industry standard malware out of a machine that i do not want there. i would trust leah with this, as a business owner and a person. they are more skilled than i am with this, and though i dont doubt that there are other people in the world who have even greater skills than leah, since they dont have my trust its a moot point. im not trying to make them out to be the world leading security expert, leah maintains firmware images and thats awesome. leahs the only person i know of who maintains firmware images that i would presently trust with my firmware. but obviously... when i trust leahs work on this, im also trusting a lot of other things, like codeberg. thats okay-- i also trust leahs judgement with that, and i will continue to provided they dont abuse or mishandle that trust like mark shuttleworth did with ubuntu. its still a fact that trusting leahs images means trusting codeberg too. leah also promotes self-hosting, which is good, but that means youre either trusting a hosting company or (better yet) trusting a machine you physically own. but in either example youre also trusting the machine that the image is hosting on, all the way up to trusting that ken thompson isnt making it all up (he isnt) and trusting the page that serves the paper that ken thompson ALLEGEDLY wrote (but if i keep this up its going to sound like i got the idea from mjg who has a penchant for this sort of thing and might start saying why vulcan isnt...) "because it isnt!" anyway, im not trying to make a big deal of ken thompsons classic point. rather theres a similar and slightly less technical version of this which has nothing at all to do with cryptographic signing or whether ken thompson ACTUALLY ever wrote that paper, nonetheless thats being said just for fun. the actual point is that nearly everything leahs "small business" comes from is actually from another, often larger business. the computers, the tools, the raw materials most definitely, and this is actually a point made by marx (or lenin, trotsky, possibly all of the above) so really, EVERY business is a pretty large corporation. what im NOT trying to do, is conflate a lot of smaller businesses working with other small AND large businesses with say, one giant corporation. i mean its almost like that-- but not entirely. obviously there are some limited advantages of buying from a smaller business like minifree, and yes, i prefer to do business with smaller businesses when its possible and reasonable to do so. my point isnt that the differences dont exist, but that the reality of a "small business" is far from what the words "small business" tend to make people think. i dont think its a secret that leah doesnt buy tools from mom-n-pops smelting ore in their backyards to make little precision screwdrivers. but when you think about a "small business", how often do you really factor in the size of the other businesses youre doing business with indirectly, with every purchase? thats what i mean. and heres a troubling example-- even if i go to a little shop down the street selling various items, i can ask, but how often will i pick something up that they simply ordered from amazon? this gets even worse with small computer-related businesses, but ive been boycotting amazon for nearly 20 years and if everything i buy from someone else just comes from amazon, im getting only things i really do not want. minifree, like any "small" business is just a less convoluted interface to a staggering juggernaut of commerce. im sure as a libertarian (but this is speculation of course) leah imagines a lot of things improving by moving more bits and pieces away from larger (and more impersonal) competition. i mean, if leah thought bigger businesses were always better businesses, i doubt they would have set up minifree in the first place. this is certainly NOT a defence of larger businesses, and i already said its not a critique of minifree either-- it still isnt. what i hope to introduce is the idea that moving from bigger businesses, to smaller businesses, while ABSOLUTELY a great place to start is really just a sort of reform. reforms arent bad, theyre just limited. we need to do a lot more to solve the problems that reform helps us stem the tide of. would i recommend a business like minifree with an owner like leah over a big corporation that (lets say hypothetically) does the same service on hundreds of machines a week? in most instances, probably, yes! but are we ever going to live in a small-business-world, where (as a rule) you do business with people like leah through things like minifree? NO. and thats the thing. we arent going to have that because THAT ISNT HOW CAPITALISM WORKS. and it doesnt matter how many people tell you thats the point of libertarianism (it probably isnt, though you could have fooled me) because that isnt how anything works or will work. with capitalism, small business is the exception-- big bloated abuses of power are the RULE. for example, i dont blame minifree for selling a machine made with conflict minerals. for all i know, leah knows more about which machines have those than i do (its plausible) and i have no clue which of my laptops have what percentage of those. what i do know is that as a small business (or even a large business) these problems will only get reformed, NOT ultimately solved, under capitalism. leah cant do that, microsoft cant do that, amazon cant do that, and when they DO manage that sort of thing they simply find another opportunity to exploit someone or something else instead-- because thats how capitalism works AS A RULE. it HAS TO, because thats how PROFIT works-- as a rule. its truly marvelous that a small business can put its foot down about this detail or that-- thats exactly what minifree does with firmware, and thats absolutely the appeal of minifree, and its a GOOD angle! id be happy to throw money at that. (i will not however, do overseas shipping-- no fault of leahs whatsoever). you simply cant build a just world this way. sooner or later you try to do enough good (like the fsf used to do-- and they totally did) and youll simply get bought out-- or sabotaged. or theyll beat you with (unfair) competition. thats how capitalism works. but its not just that its unfair and deeply competitive-- the more key point here is that business (in general, not picking on any small company) ultimately works by profit, and profit ultimately works by exploitation. if leahs not exploiting anyone directly, then the OTHER businesses minifree relies on will. some of them will. what leah can do about this is try to reform as many factors and sources as possible-- a noble effort, im not trying to discourage or belittle that. im only talking about the ultimate and overarching limitations on doing so. NO company in the world can fix this inevitability. its an inherent flaw in the system, and minifrees noble (admirable, worthwhile) efforts to fix some things will never remove that inherent flaw. it should be clear by now that this is a critique of capitalism, not of minifree or any other small business. im obviously not saying that small businesses are pointless just because theyre part of a larger system thats inherently broken. "pointless" is the wrong word, the correct word is limited. we cant get to a just world through such reform-- its necessary to fix the system itself. the thing is, capitalism doesnt want to be fixed. people much worse than leah dont even consider it broken. the flaws intrinsic to business that neither a small business nor a megacorporation can ever fix are not flaws in everyones opinion-- exploitation is not a bad thing, to the people who are willing and able to exploit everyone else. capitalism is just the wrong system for fixing the world-- its not the fix, its the problem. but if youre talking about mere reform, then sure. small businesses can help there, and some reform is a wonderful thing. and minifree is-- seriously-- a wonderful thing. it was stallmans own movement that made me think libertarianism could work in the first place. before that, i would have been more mainstream left, which is actually centrist. the thing is, i hate political scams. illegal wars are political scams, libertarianism is a political scam, the mainstream left is a political scam, and open source is a political scam. every one of these scams is (in some instances, literally) a counterrevolution. i want to be ABSOLUTELY CLEAR about this: doing business with companies like minifree is a FANTASTIC place to START. we have a VERY long way to go before a business like minifree shows the limitations of what it can do to help make the world better. the fsf for example, has already reached that limitation. the fsf is a NOT-FOR-PROFIT even, which really ought to make it more difficult for that limitation to be found. not-for-profit incorporation CAN be a plus- thats why i suggest never hosting your primary code repo on anything BUT a not-for-profit organisations platform-- or on your own. but as the fsf demonstrates, its still not completely immune (its not impervious) to the same problem that all small businesses (and large corporations) have in this system: capitalism DESTROYED the fsf, and the gnu project. i dont expect (or require) leah to agree with me on this-- its what happened regardless. not-for-profits have their own advantages, but they are not immune either. to be certain, bad decisions also destroyed the fsf-- ive said as much countless times. but even with all the poor decisions made, capitalism has been SYSTEMATICALLY wearing down the fsf since 1998, or really before that. linus torvalds exploited free software, more than he helped it. he was NEVER an ally, he was always an exploiter. and some people who serve that system are worse than linus (some are much worse) and some are better, like leah. it doesnt matter because the system itself exists to take more from people than will ever be sustainable. you cant fix capitalism with capitalism. the only good thing you can say about ANY business in this regard, is that its not pointless to try to find the LEAST evil evils, because progress doesnt begin with the perfect idea or the perfect implementation. progress usually does start with reform-- the only problem is when it stops with reform, which is what killed the fsf. it would similarly destroy any other organisation that puts its own existence over the sustainability of the movement it claims to advance. so yeah, go buy a dozen minifree laptops. buy me one! but the system will still need to be actually fixed. reform is only going to take society as far as reform can get. thats a guarantee. as for fedfree and leah-- the point of both is theyve gone FARTHER than the fsf already on issues that the fsf has neglected for more than a decade. giving leah money is not a bad way to start, it just wont fix the flaws that society is suffering from. no purchase, no business, ever will. theres an entire system of commerce hanging over minifree that stays the same when even the BEST businesses do everything they can. we need more than better businesses, we still need better politics and a better society. license: 0-clause bsd ``` # 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 # # Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any # purpose with or without fee is hereby granted. # # THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES # WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF # MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR # ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES # WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN # ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF # OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE. ``` => https://freesoftwareresistance.neocities.org