[Nomentatus]

I think Google and Yahoo, etc, have swung and missed a few times, too.

You don't want them to be dependent on a competitor... neither do I, but with "antimonopoly" (really market power, bundling and patent misuse) laws having not been properly enforced for decades, those few companies still alive to bid, are the only "market." Given the almost zero marginal cost of reproduction of software, it's been a perfect storm. Please give Mozilla credit for being one of the rare counterforces.

SpaceX has been able to snag lots of government contracts designed to increase competition, true. Similar government contracts to build public internet infrastructure under a BSD license haven't been offered, but they might be a great idea - however such proposals aren't part of the political scene right now. If you want that, by all means push for it politically. That makes more sense to me than punishing the messenger (that search monopoly is a problem), i.e. Mozilla.

[wumpus]

Funny that you'd mention the BSD license: an overwhelming amount of early code released under the BSD license was paid for by government grants.

[Nomentatus]

Of course, surveillance infrastructure remains heavily funded: "Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research." https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

[wumpus]

I was thinking of things like the BSD implementation of the TCP stack, and the MPICH implementation of the MPI message passing standard.