toweringgoat
does not necessarily mean:
>> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft.
Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for:
- Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software.
- Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.)
It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).
- MS Office compatibility, which Libreoffice invests heavily in.
- Security: from what I remember OpenOffice struggled to ship fixes to various security issues in the past years. Meanwhile LibreOffice invest quite a bit: they're able to ship security fixes fast, and have spent time fuzzing and otherwise hardening code.
- Support: if you want commercial support, LibreOffice has that (not relevant for consumers, but important for enterprise).
OpenOffice hasn't even had a major release since 2014, only very rare point upgrades. That kind of cadence speaks for itself.
Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.
You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.
Rust seems to have a strong community of voluntary contributors, and could probably be run without company backing. Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome - primarily dependent on a wide base of volunteers.
Then there are projects with a mix: plenty of volunteers, along with many commercial contributors - the commercial contributors tend to be more significant (certainly they add more code - but then they're the ones pushing new features for their customers) - but then there are enough volunteer contributions that the projects aren't dependent on the commercial entities. Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, Kubernetes, VSCode, come to mind. And with multiple commercial entities, it's not a tragedy if one drops out.
Then there are those projects with a single commercial backer, and fewer volunteers. Those are the ones that die off when the company drops out. The question is - is Servo in this category?
That said, Servo did seem to be one of the more lively places, so perhaps it will continue.
Please learn some basic geography. Norway (and Switzerland) are not in the EU.
This e-voting system is optional, can't be used for more than 1/3rd of voters in a given district, and is only being used by a small number of regions.
Given what's happened here, the moratorium on e-voting looks like it could well happen after all (funnily enough, that will also go to a vote).
Travelling to France feels similar to travelling to the US to me. Horrible infrastructure (especially Paris IMHO). Similar feelings for some other European countries, Italy at the forefront.
Better models are places like the Nordics, New Zealand, Singapore. But more middlingly, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, all outclass life in the US or France. Heck, I'd even say China are doing a lot better in many regards (they have their own issues of course, but many aspects are strong).
The courier/post office will generally validate that that sticker matches the value you told them for insurance purposes either way.
Some countries implement the above, some don't.
You will have to pay fees, correct, that's just the cost of compliance in today's world though. The fees are comparable to fees at US based banks FWIW (except the US banks will charge those even to residents in certain cases).
And they're not a bank, meaning your cash isn't insured. (Unless you reside in the USA, in which case you can get a proper bank account with FDIC insurance).
Other countries with sane laws can also group together to scale.
Think banking secrecy, but for cloud data.
Ever heard of Singapore? Hong Kong? Switzerland?
And at that point there's a lot of paperwork to correctly attribute the foreign taxes. Even more so if the country one lives in has mandatory pension or retirement funds, at which point you need someone well versed in 2+ country's tax laws and corresponding agreements to figure out what to write in the forms, never mind what needs paying. (Did I mention: once the country of residence processes the tax return, the US tax return may need amending with further payments based on the actual tax amount in the country of residence.) It's pure expensive time-killing bureacracy.
It gets worse if you want to invest outside of your retirement schemes. Other posters here seem to have already brought up the PFIC issue.
One result of the tax laws is that Americans are nowadays refused custom at most financial institutions in most countries.
The French do like their train strikes though. Maybe let's try Japan. Tokyo to Kyoto: 2.5 hours train, 5 hours by car.
Additional advantage: I can walk around, and get a meal (not sure about the Shinkansen, but the TGV does have a restaurant). And read, or work, or daydream.
The Japanese are still the most efficient at boarding though.
But the system is quite flaky, my arrival/departure record is missing a few departures - and I think that's where CBP want to improve things, possibly so they can more legitimately claim that someone overstayed when their records are incomplete. (And I guess also to spot passport swaps.)
You'll universally find a much better healthcare system (e.g. health insurance not tied to your employer), with the exception of the UK. You'll find a humane immigration system that doesn't kick you out if your employer decides to screw you over (again with the exception of the UK). You'll generally have some form of state support if you lose your job instead of being thrown to homelessness. Etc etc. The US is a second world country nowadays.
And any children you might have will be far safer, and at lower risk for severe mental health problems.
Tax breaks for companies are a subsidy. (Aside from the military cross-subsidisation.)
But as yayana points out, none of those factors depend on being rich in well run countries. (There are alternatives to the scandinavian models with a bit less nanny state that also achieve all of those factors, but the Scandinavian countries are the most famous for letting you not care about medical care and bad employers.)