They have something similar in Aus called the Capital Gains Tax and it is something that is inherrently political, unfortunately you can't uncouple the government from as they provide the public service that maintain and collect taxes. Honestly the public service should be answerable to parliament, not government.
Not to mention CGT been tweaked to ineffectiveness by previous governments by excluding assets from its calculations, notably housing, which has skewed CGT away from its original purpose and it's now more of a stick to whack at industries that aren't cozy with the current government.
FirefoxOS was also exclusively targeting the touchscreen market, which by that point was already totally saturated. Their partner deals weren't the best either, and they really launched their product before it was ready which sullied their image quite a bit.
KaiOS had the benefit of hindsight to see where Mozilla fell over, put in mitigations, and then shift focus to non-touchscreen devices to lower costs even further.
A lot of their stack is still open source under the MPLv2, however there are rumours that Google is 'encouraging' KaiOS to shift their rendering engine over to Blink. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen.
Actually, there's not been much change from the original fork of FirefoxOS besides the UI changes to be better for non-touch devices.
GerdaOS (LineageOS for KaiOS) allows people to import and run FirefoxOS packages without modification, though many apps will need some changes to allow it to work without a touchscreen.
The unofficial rumour mill says that with the extra investment from Google, KaiOS will probably shift to Chrome(ium) at some point in the future, but that's just a rumour and remains to be seen.
Under Australian law public domain exists but only after the full copyright term expires. There's no legal mechanism for an author to relinquish their copyright over their works and dedicate it directly to the public domain.
I just want a solution that I know is FOSS, secure and won't use my data for analytics. I have no way of knowing that from a proprietary application so it doesn't fit my use case.
But that's not the case most of the time. Many apps aren't just one man operations, they pull in contributions from other authors and if it is GPL in any way, it becomes a mess to change that after the fact.
If you're so concerned about a 'podcast ecosystem being built on open, decentralized standards limits' then why are you even talking about a proprietary app in the first place? You're trying to set up a strawman here that you yourself say that you don't agree with.
Just tell people to use a FOSS podcast app like Antennapod and to avoid closed silo listings and move on.
Australian here, government 100% funds the ABC and the reporting produced is better than the commercial networks of 7, 9 and 10.
It also funds most of the SBS, a foreign language service meant to foster multiculturalism and introduce foreign cinema and television to those who wouldn't normally have easy access to it. And they do a lot of English language subtitles for smaller foreign releases.
I've never seen the appeal of Pocket Casts or these almost-a-service podcast apps.
I've been using Antennapod for over a year now and it a great podcast app and does a lot of stuff the paid ones won't even do, including syncing what episodes I've listened to to gpodder.net, searching iTunes and other websites and just having an easy to use, simple UI.
It's just a shame that these FOSS apps which have much lower overheads as well, just can't market themselves as a commercial proprietary application like Pocket Casts can.