This is likely known, from other interaction or from piecing together from other blog posts, but: I'm pretty extreme in my free software enthusiasm.

Like, way deep.

Like mess up my daily life deep. Performance of my 10+ year old computers is restricted by rejecting nonfree drivers. My phone barely works. I struggle with paying for parking, or getting into events, or sometimes even accessing public resources. My committment to free software is deeply engrained in my life, and is a core part of who I am.

I have next to me a biochip I'm scheduled to get implanted into myself tomorrow—a DT flexSecure, a Java Card with an exciting assortment of libre applets with uses in security, identification, cryptography, storage, and more. But this "Java Card Open Platform" is not nearly as open as I thought. Despite the name, the operating system is not released as free software. And while all tools I aim to use on it free, the only SDK implementation that seems to exist is distributed only in a compiled form under a nonfree license. These free and open applications can't even be built without being tainted by precompiled blobs.

And yet, I am still going to inject it into my body.

To take a pillar which I have built so much of my life around, and make a direct contradiction to it a part of myself.

I'm reminded that I take medication that includes animal collagen. But somehow this is worse?

Peers with more extreme positions have compromised before, based on availability of options. Some others use nonfree components only because their lifestyle demands tasks of them that free software cannot presently accommodate. I myself have an automobile with a completely nonfree stack, and I use nonfree tools to interface with it. My phone has a libre userspace in the modem, yet it necessarily has nonfree bits, unavoidable in order to use the device normally as a phone. Even this medication—though not taking it wouldn't kill me—I choose to draw a line to avoid negative consequences to my health. Most of these have workarounds and are not strictly neccesary, but barriers in alternatives make them practically necessary.

But this isn't really a matter of necessity. I don't need this chip. I've touched in previous posts what this practice means to me—it's a matter of philosophy, challenge, and aesthetic, before one of functional utility.

But I consider all the hackers on the frontiers of tech who came before me. They didn't have the options in the ecosystem we see today. They worked for it; forging the way, and compromising where needed in order to get there.

So for now, I do the best I can; I take what I can get while pushing boundaries, in myself and in the world. And if it makes sense to, I compromise.