[dredmorbius]

Public infrastructure gets financed through taxes and is performed via executive departments or government contracts, sometimes as academic research.

Software may need to adopt this model.

It's ocurred to me that ancient symbolic megaprojects (e.g., pyramid-building) may have played roles in developing and maintaining technical skills, supply chains, and generaal interest. All the cool hard problems, great minds, and stable funding.

[trevyn]

This is a big part of Kurt Mendelssohn's thesis in The Riddle of the Pyramids, which is a very enjoyable read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Mendelssohn#The_Pyramid_T...

Also, I am pleased that this discussion is in a thread about Cairo.

[dredmorbius]

Thank you!

I'd arrived at the possibility independently, glad to see I'm not the first. Hugely appreciate the reference.

[marcus_holmes]

Do you want political control over key internet infrastructure? Because that's how you get political control over key internet infrastructure...

[sofixa]

There is already implicit political control. If the US wants to ban X, or forbid encryption, it will impact almost everyone on the planet. Much less so if it were Afghanistan, of course.

The EU has a funs that donates money and runs bug bounty programs for critical FOSS software it uses. It should be expanded to include more underlying libraries and lower-level projects, but it's a pretty good start and doesn't come with strings attached.

[rolandog]

The EU sounds like a great approach; do you know if and how often they re-evaluate the impact and level of their dependencies?

[marcus_holmes]

> doesn't come with strings attached.

yet

[dredmorbius]

What we have now is corporate control, often with covert government influence, and benign-to-malicious neglect.

I'm willing to risk public support in at least part.