Genuinely curious as to where this isn’t elementary knowledge?

Are you from a region that never had a similar practice or one where it has become inconspicuous, e.g. father of the bride “giving away” their daughter?

For a long-term open source user, this thought seems backward. While I agree that the two axes are separate, don’t then tie innovation to corporate interests where it doesn’t belong.

Open source has driven and continues to drive innovation, in all fields not just those with low capital barriers to entry. Name any category and the innovation leaders are generally open source to some degree although also often commercial. This holds true even for Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Google and especially so for ‘plumbing’. On the other hand Linux, Git, Postgres, Node dispel the requirement of needing corporate owners. At the cutting edge I would hazard that academia plays a larger role than corporate interest.

It’s only when a product category becomes monopolisable that corporate investment becomes attractive. By that stage much of the groundwork is already complete. For some categories, monopolisation never materialises, or as you say, the general public doesn’t care. This doesn’t mean products don’t exist, merely that marketing doesn’t have sufficient budget to reach an incurious public.

The core issue is why we want to invest money domestically. If it’s strictly to punish others by recreating the same or similar exploitative structures for products that are already free, that doesn’t make much sense. If it’s to protect sovereignty, fair enough but we can simultaneously strike better tradeoffs between freedom and features as we go, harming nobody.

Could be a great time for small services and modular subscriptions (e.g. block stores or MTAs). I wouldn’t trust many small VPS’ to host an organisation, but it is fine for me personally.

Hopefully enough stable income exists to grow a cottage industry of small infra and protocols lower the barrier to entry/migration.

I would pay for access to an artisanal data center of the finest organic hosts, tenderly shepherded by third generation sysadmins.