> It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).
But why is it about that? Why isn't it about e.g. governments in Europe funding the development of Linux virtualization so that it's simple to buy some hardware, put it in the back office and have an interface to it which is as easy for people to use as the incumbent cloud providers?
The vast majority of companies don't need "flexible scalability" etc. They have modest and finite loads and only ended up "in the cloud" because for ten seconds it seemed like having 100 VMs in the cloud was going to be a lot cheaper than having 100 physical servers, until it turns out that you can put those 100 VMs on two physical servers in your own possession and it costs less to do that than the cloud providers charge and then you keep control of your data and infrastructure.
> everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.
This is pretty wrong. Hardware companies sell hardware. A lot of them will try to lock you into their shitty software if you let them, but that is neither required nor desired. And some of the better ones don't, e.g. there isn't that much lock-in happening with AMD or Intel servers. We just need that to be happening for phones. And smart hardware companies can fully understand "commoditize your complement" as being in their own interest while still making a profit selling the hardware that isn't locked to any particular software.
> It makes no sense to try and fight this here
It's not clear what you're even suggesting.
Suppose you want Europeans to have access to a phone platform that isn't controlled by an American megacorp.
If they release a domestic proprietary one then other countries won't want any part of it. They don't want to be under the heel of a European megacorp any more than an American one, and indeed many will be suspicious of it and actively try to thwart adoption. And then you lose the network effect and can't get traction.
Whereas if you do something like require phone hardware to allow the user to replace the OS, and then fund development of open source phone operating systems and make sure they're required to be supported within your jurisdiction, then they can easily spread outside of your jurisdiction because people aren't nearly as suspicious and oppositional to something where you've precommitted to not putting people on the enshittification treadmill. And then everybody gets out from under the thumb of those corporations.