From the government's perspective, public highways (in particular the interstate highway system in the U.S.) serve a crucial national security and logistics fun

From the government's perspective, public highways (in particular the interstate highway system in the U.S.) serve a crucial national security and logistics function. I think this might be the more convincing argument to governments--e.g. you run code in your systems that you do not have control over, and you don't know who is making contributions to it. They could be (and probably are) agents of foreign powers trying to hack you. But this raises other issues. Let's say you're the US Air Force and you want to sponsor SQLite. I assume because SQLite is everywhere the Air Force runs it in their airplanes, no idea if true. How do you make sure the interests of the developers are aligned with the interests of the Air Force? You probably don't want to accept contributions from foreign nationals, or at least nobody you can't hunt down and prosecute if they do something malicious. You probably also want to vet them with a thorough background check. So they basically have to be employees (or contractors). If you let your enemies build your highways they'll be hiding antitank mines everywhere. Should we be letting them build our software too? I can't imagine the Air Force, for example, saying "yes". But I could imagine them being quite interested in gaining this kind of control over their infrastructural dependencies.