Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

Other countries tend to use communication applications and platforms developed at or near their country (WhatsApp seems to be one of the bigger international exceptions from my experience).

There are a few exceptions to this where massive US companies have the scale to setup native teams in markets that understand culture well. Outside of that, it tends to fall apart. Some examples come to mind: Taobao, QQ, Baidu, Yahoo Japan, Weibo, VK, Aliexpress, Line, TikTok, etc.

(Note not all of these examples may be good because I'm not intimately familiar with all of them--since I too tend to use systems developed in my country).

Facebook, Google... they seem to span cultures probably due to providing services people fundamentally want to have across cultures. Large businesses typically have the capital to invest in addressing the cultural barriers and developing solutions.

Apple has a massive share world wide but when you look at Samsung in South Korea or Huawei in China, you'll see more adoption. Some of it may be nationalistic preference but I argue much of it is due to developing products/services that properly address demands in the market (which is tightly tied to culture).

The real power of open source is that there are enough up and coming people who haven't learned this, and so if maintainers aren't supported it doesn't matter, there will be a new library to migrate to in the future by a new college grad, and this is one reason why things tend to be so unstable and short-lived.

The most successful open source projects have large corporate backing, like Kubernetes or Linux. And even Linux is a weird case, as a lot of architectural decisions and feature development are wonky because you often can't get the e.g. IO and Network subsystem guys to agree to the same idea.

Only in the extreme short term. In the medium term, the dictator inevitably ends up severed from reality by the inability of (true) data to flow back up to the authority, which results in their decisions becoming increasingly suboptimal over time.

This is the pragmatic argument in favor of free speech, really. If for the sake of argument we ignore moral and philosophical issues, the reason why free speech is important is that in its absence information does not properly flow back up to the authorities. Free information flow does not guarantee proper functioning of the system, but impeded information flow guarantees improper functioning. If your authority dictates the use of 4-inch long bolts in a place where there's only 2 inches of clearance, and nobody in the organization has the ability to feed back to the authority that information, the only possible outcomes are bad ones. This all compounds, too; the next dictate from the authority won't be able to take into account the fact that in order to fit the 4-inch bolt in, a new hole was cut in some vital structure that shouldn't be there, and some new bad decision will be made to add load to this structure, which will cause other effects. The authority ends up living in a fantasy land.

Note how this toy example seated entirely in engineering-space doesn't have any moral or philosophical component, and yet it is already sufficient to cause a bad outcome even in pure engineering terms. Moral and philosophical issues can cause yet more problems, but they'll be arriving to a space already broken.

It also doesn't matter for my purposes why the information can't flow back up to the authority. Even a well-meaning, "enlightened" dictator can end up in this situation by sheer inability to process the incoming information. The dictator may be the nicest, most well-meaning person in human history full of compassion and love and every other virtue you care to name, and they'll still break things if they insist on authoritarianism.

I'm baffled by this statement... I worked in the medical device industry for years at a company of 10k people and you would be hard pressed to find a sw engineer that didn't default to Celsius. Almost all sw engineers there either had EE, CpE or Biomedical Engineering degrees; Celsius is not remotely foreign to these types of engineers. I would be incredibly surprised if it was different at any medical device company.