Updates notes

notes/business/pricing.txt

@@ -1,10 +1,11 @@
 Picking the price
 =================
 
-How to price a SAAS product.
-
 In the end, I decided the price Blot at whatever price I would feel comfortable paying for it personally. When I started Blot, that happened to be $1 a month. I felt embarrassed about charging even that, then. Now Blot costs $4 a month and I feel like that's a fair price. I'm providing web hosting, after all. And personal support.
 
 I'm sure I could get away with charging more but I won't. I'm interested in having Blot in more hands, even if it means generating less revenue.
 
-I don't like those tables, with three or four choices, a feature list to compare against. Blot has one option, one price.
+Why doesn't Blot have pricing tiers?
+------------------------------------
+
+I don't like those tables, with three or four choices, a feature list to compare against. Blot has one option, one price. I want a world with less choice. I recognize that decision means I'm giving up revenue.

notes/politics/README

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
 Politics
 ========
 
-Running a service like Blot does require I make decisions that are political. I do try to read deeply and think deeply about everything I do with Blot and that extends to questions of a political nature.
+Running a service like Blot does require I make decisions that are political. Here is my best attempt at articulating some of those decisions.

notes/politics/censorship.txt

@@ -1,11 +1,7 @@
 # Censorship
 
-Blot has been running for a number of years now and already there are hundreds of posts and articles published that I find upsetting. But I would never remove them. I think free-speech is a good principle. Of course letting people speak freely sometimes causes others pain. On balance, I believe the pain is less damaging than the censorship needed to prevent it.
+Blot has been running for a while now and there are plenty of posts and articles published that I don't like. But I will not remove them. I recognise that there is a cost to this policy, that there is real harm as a reuslt. However, on balance, I believe the harm is preferable than the harm of a censorship regime needed to prevent it.
 
-I don't want to have the power to prevent people from reading dumb, hateful, mean and stupid things. 
+At some point in future, I suspect Blot will be blocked in one authoritarian country or another. Perhaps some bureacrat will ask me to block or remove some content from the site. Plenty of tech companies with idealistic mission statements seem to get hung up on this sort of thing – I think it's understandable, when you have employees whose livelihoods depend on the next quarter's growth. But I don't plan on ever making money in those sorts of places, so it won't matter much to me if they choose to seal themselves off from Blot.
 
-If I had a choice, I wouldn't remove anything from Blot. I am bound by the laws of the state of Washington in the USA. I will remove copyrighted material per the DMCA.
-
-At some point in future, I suspect Blot will be blocked in China, in Russia and various other states which implement internet filtering. Perhaps some bureacrat will ask me to block or remove some content from the site. It is inevitable. 
-
-Thankfully, Blot is open-source software dedicated to the public domain. You can host it on your own server.
+And for what it's worth, [Blot's source-code is dedicated to the public domain](/notes/politics/source-code). You can host it on your own server if you like.

notes/politics/source-code.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+Why is Blot's source-code dedicated to the public domain?
+=========================================================
+
+Blot caters to a largely technical audience, and I'm asking that audience to invest a good deal of their time and some of their money in a piece of software. A large fraction of that audience is sceptical of closed-source, proprietary software. So it makes business sense for me to make Blot's source code available freely under the most permissive license possible. I also quite like the spectacle of working in public. I suspect it's reassuring to potential customers to see my frantic git commits on the news page, for them to know that Blot is very much _alive_.
+
+Open-source vs. free software
+-----------------------------
+
+On a more abstract level, I like the ideals of the free software movement. I like Richard Stallman, for what it's worth. I think the 'free software' term is confusing, especially since I charge money to host Blot, and although I'm aware of the politics of the term 'open source', so I decide to side-step both terms and simply say _Blot's source-code dedicated to the public domain_.