This question has nothing to do with the country and everything to do with the person. It's entirely up to the individual how to approach this.
For an external observer, the choice made by someone else is not for you to judge. You can never know what is inside the other person's mind and whilst you might disagree, it's their choice.
I still see them in the street today, proudly holding up their chins, it's completely absurd.
More concerning is the medical professionals who make a note in your medical file because they couldn't see my face because of a mask and noting that they didn't see any evidence of respiratory distress.
As if catching COVID for the first time over Christmas a few months ago now wasn't enough proof that it's still doing the rounds and that until then my mask regime had been 100% successful.
What you might be missing from the story is that the customer was more likely than not using a landline to call technical support.
The ADSL filter sits between the telephone line from the street and the telephone.
Disconnecting the filter is equivalent to yanking the telephone socket out the wall and if you do that during the call .. no more call.
At this time many people were already using cordless phones and mobile phones were making inroads, so the link between the call dropping and removing the filter might not be immediately obvious to a clueless end user.
Source: I have had the misfortune of phoning telco helpdesk services where this kind activity would absolutely happen.
They're not being forgotten, they're being willfully ignored and actively resisted by people willing to sacrifice other people's lives for their personal monetary gain.
Not just the EU, the rest of the world. The whole point of OSS was to distribute knowledge across all of humanity, not just be used as a way to make trillions of dollars in profits by a few billionaires working off the backs of OSS developers.
OSS exists in society and contributes to society and is developed by individuals who need to get paid.
OSS is not volunteerism, it's a legal framework to ensure that everyone benefits from the communal effort.
Billionaires have made trillions of dollars off the back of that and still those same developers are struggling to eat.
So, no. I disagree strongly with your assessment and the inventor of OSS does too, Bruce Perens is attempting to address this inequity with his Post Open project.
So .. will the current administration allocate funds to research and find solutions, or just keep firing federal employees on the front line and blame immigrants?
I think that those moments exist throughout your life, some personal, some shared. As you get older, more seem to happen more often but the emotional drama seems to reduce.
For example in no particular order, here's a few:
The day my grandfather died
The first space shuttle launch
Challenger exploding
Leaving my birth country
Returning to it over a decade later
Becoming unemployed for 18 months
September 11
COVID
Brexit
Trump being elected the second time
The Berlin wall coming down
Deepwater Horizon
Getting a medical diagnosis
Asking my partner to travel around the country
Getting paid a wage the first time
Standing in the bathroom of the first house I lived in on my own
So, which of the three is the Team Lead?