Ordfall publishes its founding letter

Ordfall's founding letter is published in the newsroom, in Portuguese and English, in full. There is no form in front of it, no email address required to read it, and no summary with the rest behind a sign-up.

That is not generosity. A document stating a company's limits loses its meaning if access to it is negotiated: the only reason to gate the reading would be to turn the document into bait, and a text about refusal cannot be published as bait without contradicting itself.

What the letter states

It answers three questions, and only those. Why a company dedicated to critical systems needs to exist. What it refuses to do, named plainly and without euphemism. And what conditions have to be present for work of that kind to have any chance of succeeding.

A refusal is only real when the one refusing can afford it. The letter addresses that directly.

The most uncomfortable part of the document is the one describing the structural precondition for refusing. Listing what you will not do is easy; it is the shape of the company that decides whether the list survives the first proposal large enough to test it.

Why it is permanent

The letter is not a launch manifesto of the kind that ages quietly until it is discreetly removed. It is the document Ordfall's work should be held against, including by the people who hire it.

If what the company does ever diverges from what the letter states, one of the two will have to change in public — and the change will be dated, as this publication is.