I understand the strong negative reaction; it's common. Thanks for taking the time to formulate a response. I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance a

I understand the strong negative reaction; it's common. Thanks for taking the time to formulate a response. I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance and cleptocracy. For example, should the government maintain roads and bridges? It falls within the common good (public infrastructure) so using taxes for that makes sense. But, if the government has authority over the bridges, how to stop them from performing obligatory cavity searches (or some other bad thing) on people who use them? That's not a question of what the responsibilities or objectives of a government should be. The question is how to reform a hostile, cleptocratic government. I won't presume what context you're coming from, but I've noticed that in some cultures it's normal to think of the government as "them". For me it's "us". While someone from the former group might say "government does that", I'm inclined to say "we do that". My outlook seems to be more common in Europe than in US, I think. For me, using the government is the most direct and efficient way of maintaining FOSS, or doing anything that should be done by "us", as opposed to by "somebody". I see that as the purpose of governments. These FOSS projects spanning many borders makes things slightly harder, but that's just because we're not used to that kind of cooperation. In principle there's no reason multinational programmes for financing these things can't exist. Alternatively, make it difficult for states to use non-FOSS software. That way you'd redirect all that money being wasted on closed source.