i'll try to moderate pontifications, as your experience is more extensive than my own! And predates it.
Hopefully I am wrong as to these forces I describe as against open software. If that is the case, I wouldn't mind that one bit. Crossing my fingers..
The WTO since the beginning oif 1995 has controlled "Goods" and "Services" (around 80% of the global economy) seems to see open licensing as a trade barrier, and therefore prohibited by treaties.
Kind of like they seem to see any regulations like wage and hour laws, and labor standards .Framing such laws as speed bumps on the highway of trade. TRIPS and TRIMS regulate the new "IP" landscape. Not the Berne Convention, these days. (Or so I am told) Patents, such as patents on drugs.. were a benefit to being in it. If you are a country and you want to trade, you must accept their rules.. in order to become a WTO member.. first. So this meant that a great many poor people would die. Since they didnt have that money.
What are the implications of that? Well one was the acceptance of the drug IP landscape.. a story laid out in the award winning 2013 film
Fire in the Blood.. These laws made the manufacture of patented drugs incredibly profitable for the "owners" of these patents, even though they cost literally pennies to make, they cost tens of thousands in most of the world. Buy ir die, they seemed to be sayiing. Its now said that COVID-19 represents a once in a lifetime, Business opportunity.
They are trying to patent natural substances that should be unpatentable because they have shown promise in improviong the body's resistance to certain viruses. Because vaccines gradually offer less protection to evolving pathogens..And the SIRT system evolved to fight them. They claim a right to patent it. Buy or die.
Since Jan 1, 1995 Science doesn't belong to the Earths people. Irt belongs to the IP owning corporations! There is no such thing, legally, it seems, as a gift to everybody. At least that seems to be the officials position. That its holding the making of money back. Thats what scares me. The taking of science away from we the people. If you get better, you have to pay. Pay to live? Thats what we are heading towards with the Market spiral pricing of drugs.
Wheredoes FOSS stand without anybody standing up for it showing how many millions in sales that it has?