Yandex is European, but maybe not the right kind of European.

I wouldn’t read the lack of public investment into software as accidental. Just look how terrible investments like healthcare.gov are to see why: massive mountains of cash if you’re not a worker and no need to deliver anything usable. There’s money in not understanding how software works if you’re a politician or a contractor.

That said, I don’t think I have ever heard of governments releasing copyrighted, closed-source software, let alone trying to make money off it. That just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see any reason why the lack of a profit motive would be a detriment to competition in the event governments do invest in free software

Honestly this seems like something a trade treaty would be useful for if it weren’t written by multinational corporations. Until then we’re gonna be stuck with really, really shitty decisions as individuals, like ios vs android.

Hell, have you seen any competition in software in private markets? There’s isolated pockets of competition in certain circumstances, but from my perspective the major markets all colluded to fuck us roughly the same ways.

That said, this effort will fail for lack of decent hardware investment to keep costs down.

Just recently, the DWD (German Meteorological Service) was banned from providing a free (and ad-free) general purpose weather app, after they were sued by other app developers that felt that competing with a government financed agency would be unfair.

Of course an app is a much smaller project than launching a cloud provider.