RE: https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud/117359711364631730
President Obama said in 2012 that America will remain the only "indispensable nation", and I'm beginning to think this specific idea or slogan may have originated from the tech sector. The idea goes beyond "Pax Americana" to mean that doing anything (like filing your taxes or watching TV) is impossible without US corporations acting as middlemen.
FWIW, this resonates with the Trump regime's stated goal of total "energy dominance" and its new Energy Dominance Council. In this case the goal is to make energy access so contentious and expensive that only the involvement of the US military can assure access.
Now access to information, compute resources and apps has been made contentious and expensive. And Trump insists that data center construction must not be stopped...
Also, I think open source communities (including Linux and BSDs) are largely in denial about this affecting us. The pattern has been that a European Linux distro (usually Ubuntu) introduces an innovation to make the desktop environment better, and then IBM Red Hat workers suddenly "find" a similar thing they had laying around unpublished, and then the Red Hat thing becomes the new standard. Red Hat also claims authorship of much if not most of the Linux kernel, and that it can place restrictions on distribution that the rest of us would not dare.
So the Desktop Linux community is letting a US server corporation with a notable disinterest in desktops steer its desktop development roadmap.
