When you go down this rabbit hole enough though you realize how totally inept pretty much every government has been in facilitating standards and supporting inf

When you go down this rabbit hole enough though you realize how totally inept pretty much every government has been in facilitating standards and supporting infrastructural software throughout the tech sector since its inception. Projects like BSD, ARPANET, etc were largely public money going into public software that was liberally licensed. Huge swathes of modern tech are built on foundations of public funding. But by and large today there is absolutely no interest or investment at the state actor level into infrastructural software - Linux is built by corporate involvement, html by whatwg, and fundamental technologies like how ubiquitous Blink and V8 are becoming throughout the software stack are corporations acting as authorities on structural software because public actors have totally failed to fill a necessary role in providing these interoperabilities for decades. The IETF was publicly funded before 93 but became a nonprofit thereafter. There are now dozens of similar foundations relying on largely corporate sponsorship to develop standards - new ones like Matrix, old ones like XMPP, or are just largely dumps of corporate will on our collective experience like PDF. Activitypub is a W3C standard but the W3C is basically a private club for university departments at this point. Again, it had public funding and involvement in the 90s that atrophied over time. The consequences of our fragment ecosystems built largely on lock-in for-profit motives have wasted a billion man hours of human labor reinventing the same wheels and have produced a software ecosystem where free software is predated by the most powerful and wealthy companies to ever exist on Earth to produce insane profits never before realized. And its largely a consequence of totally non-existent climates of public infrastructural software development being funded and paid for by tax revenues. If humanity survives in some form long term future generations will look back at this period and ask "how were these monkeys so stupid as to not collectivize coherent standards and have them deployed ubiquitously to make the benefits of software more available to all and to push the envelope of progress faster?" Hell the premier way to do complex research or theoretical experiments in software today is with CUDA, a holistically proprietary toy of Nvidia used to sell 5000% marked up workstation graphics cards because public institutions have been totally unable to even recognize that's a problem let alone do anything about it. Its a problem the west is having in many industries. The cult like idolization of the profit motive as a means to every end means roads crumble, bridges collapse, Internet infrastructure goes undeveloped, transit is nonexistent, housing is a nightmare, and software is in a perpetual wild-west state of eating itself reinventing the same wheels in perpetuity to try to appease gambling addict shareholders.