Governments neither need to nor should fund free software. The US Government should have fined Microsoft at least $10billion for their monopolistic business pra

Governments neither need to nor should fund free software. The US Government should have fined Microsoft at least $10billion for their monopolistic business practices when they had 95% of the desktop OS market, then dismantled the company into its constituent parts, then used that fine to set up a fund to fund innovative software development companies. Instead, they... did nothing. Classic US government. >The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly. It's not expensive at all, no. It's the opposite of expensive. Microsoft has done countless things that are completely explicitly illegal to do, that are very anti-competitive. They should have been fined billions and broken up a decade or more ago. No lawsuits, no juries, just the FTC doing what it was made to do. >Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me. I have no idea how you think it's okay to blame the EU for 'protecting farmers' while not blaming the US for its much more pervasive farmer protectionism and subsidies (including paying people not to farm their land) and not dealing with Microsoft themselves, an American company. >Most politicians are old and most old people don't understand computers, the internet and it's consequences. They don't get what is at stake. I still hope that some day people will get elected in Europe that understand theses issues. Saying that 'politicians are old and don't understand computers' might have made sense three decades ago, but it makes less and less sense today. Politicians today grew up with computers.