Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech

Hard to be an alternative when you serve the same master.

every now and then open source is suggested as superior, because being free. Zero comment on code quality, who wrote it, why it came to be in the first place.

Even the argument that a host running open source makes delivery more trustworthy is super biased - major cognitive dissonance is that services based on open tech are very often not open, neither auditable.

There’s a lot of open source being controlled by same large corporations and the part that is not, does not constitute a service on its own.

Then we must admit it takes a lot of care taking care of services nobody else cares about (by means of support).

While open source is important for academia, I think open results are more important for government. Like I don’t care what somebody used to cater to this geospatial data, or that image. I care about the data that went in and went out. Open data is much more important in the era of open weights and closed sources training sets.

The general public is often misled to equate open source to free beer. Well that is also not entirely correct given plethora of not so free licenses. Asp not correct as costs are greater when you put the personnel running that service in the equation. I can see how this argument does not fly well with socialist ideologies, but that’s problem of ideology, not of costs or technology.

Even if we consider only those open projects which are also free - these come with less guaranties than a pair of second hand shoes bought from random store.

Don’t get me wrong - open source is great and we use it daily, but comparing means of distribution with quality of service is really like comparing ябълки и круши (apples and pears in Bulgarian). So it’s indeed time to stop blindly waving the open source flag, but actually try to understand the benefits and challenges it comes with.

Then the whole issue with non-copyleft licenses, that are nothing other than the old Whateverware or Public Domain licenses from the 16 bit home computer days.

We already had access to source code back then.

And for a large crowd this is already good enough, they aren't into it for religious definitions.

imho the question should be if the country continues to function if the project goes bankrupt. If it is so essential that it needs to be saved by the government (even in theory) then it lives outside the domain of capitalism.