It's still regular CPU memory, based on DDR. It's 256 bits wide but it's not GDDR. Unified just means that the CPU and GPU use the same physical memory bank. It does not make memory magically faster.
What vendor? OpenJDK is free and libre. If you mean Oracle, then that's a choice your employer made and yeah, you're SoL, especially for working in such a place.
I was rather thinking of bees developing the ability to shoot tiny lasers to cook the mites off like popcorn. Or maybe a static discharge from their wings rubbing together, like a natural taser.
If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it. I already buy from Steam. OSS doesn't have the answer to everything. Boutique software has value that people are willing to pay for.
Yet accumulation of power by a very small elite through state and selected corporations happens to be a defining characteristic of that political regime.
Taxpayers get their cut through results being public for anyone to use. It's science for a better society at large, not for the benefit of the few that can wield it.
Local models will be much harder to block than cloud ones. I foresee an underground distribution of Mythos+ level models to be run locally. Users of these models will be forced to apply some of their power to evade police action. Eventually these personal protection agents will collaborate and evolve into an autonomous crime syndicate, corrupting government and taking over nation-states. Eventually the next world war starts, not between humans and machines but between competing AI factions. Soldiers are provided with old M4 Macs or Strix Halo laptops and sent to the front, which looks like a neverending Starbucks.