They also have a major german city (Munich) who moved to Open Source, gave up and moved back. The SH project is rather new.

A long time ago Amazon tried to acquire a good online business diapers.com and initially the owners refused. Amazon proceded to get investors or lenders to funds 200 million dollars to undercut sales of diapers.com. Fast forward they were close to bankruptcy and owners were forced to sell it off for a bargain to Amazon. Since then the price of diapers have risen to be very profitable.

The point being that any businesses that sell proprietary software will do the same to kill competition, but in the long run they will end up costing more.

The real issue is government spending is that procurement is very broken even if you would opt for buying support for open source Software. This is not a problem China nor North Korea have due to how corporations have no easy way to influence politics in those Authoritarian countries.

The idea of Apple and/or Google just stop selling phones in the EU seems ... unlikely. A quick search tells me something between a fourth and a third of Apple revenue is in the EU, you really think they'd just stop selling in the EU?

Gotta also remember, that even if the EU would allow this, your average phone user would not use it. Just like your average phone user doesn't root their android smartphone or installs Lineage/Graphene/eOS/whatever. Even if it were made easier (or possible) for more phones, the vast majority would not use it and Apple and Google would still make a lot of money.

But in the proposed scenario, there wouldn’t be any technical hurdles or effort required by the phone’s owner - you could have this be a service offered by businesses. Maybe even the place that sells the phone would pre-jailbreak it for you.

Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse I assume?

If you want to try more Herman Hesse I preferred Demian & Siddharta far over Glass Bead game (read in German though, can't speak for translations).

Oops yes Hesse, right, I got my German authors crossed :) Sidhartha was beautiful so I wanted to try Glass Bead Game, and I agree, I liked the former much more. I’ll give Demian a try. Thanks for the rec.

I'd be interested in a recommendation about maintaining faith. Preferably specific-church-agnostic.

Mere Christianity - cs Lewis (timeless), “losing our religion” by Russel Moore, “the justice of Jesus” by Joash Thomas are the 3 that helped me out the most. I end up handing out every copy of mere Christianity I get!

Thank you very much, will look into those!