mle

These quotes go to show how bigger corporations like Valve can still be a helpful, desirable influence in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community.

Unfortunately, as far as bigger corporations go, there are very few that are “like Valve”…

I think there are a lot of ways this is technologically solvable. Imho this is an economic challenge, not a technological one.

Larry Ellisons Oracle gobbled up many great companies and open source projects and sucked the life out of them, such as Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice, MySQL to name just a few

If the power goes out there will be no signalling on the tracks, no barriers or traffic lights at level crossings, no lights or announcements at train stations, etc.

Even though a diesel locomotive technically could run with no external power, no regular train will be operating during a general power outage.

Same goes for an EMP, even though that would likely fry the diesel locos control systems anyways

In Switzerland we basically had ISP monopolies back in the day on cable (DOCSIS) and on the phone (xDSL) networks. Prices were ok, but not low. Then fiber optic as a viable tech came around, but neither of the large ISP was particularly eager to build out a fiber infrastructure, as it was more lucrative to just sit on their “old” tech, knowing the ohter party won’t be building fiber, so won’t have a better offer either

So what happend then was that munincipalities built their own fiber networks, renting them out to the ISPs, large and small ones, either as an IP service or as dark fiber for ISPs which want to provide their own equipent. Only the largest ISP still builds their own fiber infrastructure, in parallel, and they are required by law to rent out that infrastructure to other ISPs as well.

This has really leveled the playing field, brought good competition and lowered the prices.

So I think government owned infrastructure is the way to go, but it takes a long time to build out and needs the right policies and legal framework to succeed.