>The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue

Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.

>Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?

Yes, of course.

Yet it's not American "public" money that funded it.

And it's good to realize what 'public' means in this case: paid for by the general public. What companies produce is also (often) paid for by them, only not via taxes but through purchases, subscriptions, etc. Why should the software produced by companies be exempt?

American public money funded most of the tech that the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value. Your American using Italian uni stuff is nonsense.

So the argument is basically: because taxes, and only taxes, paid for something somewhere, it should be free for everybody everywhere?

Ah wait, you're somebody else. Why the somewhat unhinged attack on Europe? Because Europe is getting US tech for free?

30 years ago, one of the things we were all naively hoping for was that a globally connected network would help to reduce the tribalism, obsolete these "American money" and "European bits" and "Chinese protocols" ideas and stop all the cross-border fighting over what's mine and what's yours. When a piece of software has contributors from 50 countries, how could it "belong" to one country? Obviously we are in an even worse spot, global cooperation wise, now than we were in the 90s.

I've seen this work in certain situations, CERN and the LHC for example (I was on a data team for a detector). Everyone was driven by the science, where you came from didn't matter. With that said, and this part is going to be inflammatory potentially, people who are fear and tribal/in group driven are likely never going to be swayed (and building the mental model up via comments to properly contextualize this is beyond the scope of this thread). Tech doesn't fix people problems.

It might have been a bit naive, and very much reliant on a more open, more liberal, and less neo-liberal, international order than we have right now. Greed and power are conducive to such ideals.

Indeed, it appears they are upset that "the whole Europe is depending on and extracting trillions of dollars value" from American open source spend in some way.

> It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.

When it is funded publicly it certainly is. A key feature of the university research system is that it is where people are supported without the expectation that their work is going to be commercially useful in any near-term time frame. If something is going to be commercially valuable then people should develop it in the private sphere. Nothing stopping them. In fact, that is basically what the US does and it has been wildly successful and relegated the EU to being a technical backwater trying to figure out how to get out from under the US's commercial dominance.

> Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?

Yes. Knowledge is for everyone. Even the Americans. Trying to hold back the progress of the entire species because the US knows how to pump out software is a remarkably myopic strategy.

That seems contradictory with the idea that software should be developed in the private sphere: closed source, proprietary APIs, patents and trade secrets are the antithesis of sharing knowledge.

> A key feature of the university research system is that it is where people are supported without the expectation that their work is going to be commercially useful in any near-term time frame

Idk where you got that idea from, but it's not an accurate picture since the mid 1980s. Yes, there is "fundamental" research, which is mostly a label for commercially not that interesting work (and cannot be expected to yield much open source anyway), but short-term project work and third-party funding are big. Also, much of the research is done with an eye towards profit, certainly in the medical and tech sector. And in the US, universities rely on a lot of private money.

> Knowledge

Knowledge isn't OSS. This (part of the) thread is specifically about (usable) software.

> the progress of the entire species

Them's big words.