Country A isn't losing anything by allowing others to use it. Even if no one contributes back developers can spend that time doing other valuable work, rather then re-invent the wheel in every country around the world.

Country A has to pay more for development because the company won't be payed again for this software by countries B and C.

So to start the FOSS process there is a need to somehow have for each niche a GPL software base that cuts costs by a lot.

Countries a, b, c already can reuse their code/don’t duplicate effort. Others will join for sure. They’ll also get free code/bug fixes from people who want to contribute. People do it for many reasons, just listing you’re contributor to gov project can look nice on cv. No tax money is paid for that. If other countries want to use but not contribute back - so what? I don’t think it ever bothered anybody that their open source lib/whatever was used by people who don’t contribute back to it or by people who themselves don’t have open source projects.

> That may be fair if everyone is doing the same and contributing fairly (hard to assess that), but if countries A,B,C are the only ones contributing (paying) and everyone else just use, then it is not fair or sensible.

Isn't this the purpose of the GPL? "Sure, you can use our code, but any additions need to be reusable as well, so everyone is contributing fairly."

Unless, of course, countries B,C,D don't change anything, in which case, no actual loss to country A.

Hard to sue someone in another country.

> if countries A,B,C are the only ones contributing (paying) and everyone else just use, then it is not fair or sensible.

There's Open Source and then there's the Licensing of Open Source. Just because the source is available does not automatically mean it's free to use under any circumstance.

Licensing is a separate and complicated issue.

Wealth is not a zero sum game.

In a finite system, it is.

..which we don't have and no one, ever, has lived in.