The exit has a sponsor

Fourteen test releases. A year of work. On Thursday F-Droid shipped 2.0, the largest update to the free-software Android store in a decade, and it topped Hacker News with nearly 1,300 points. The same day Daniel Gultsch explained why Conversations, his XMPP client, is now free and ships primarily through F-Droid. And on Friday morning a Dutch government initiative called DAWO turned up on the front page with a NixOS-based workplace meant to replace Microsoft's.

Read quickly, that's three exits from Big Tech and a good week for software freedom. Read closely, it's something narrower and more useful. None of these exits was paid for by users choosing to leave. Each one had a sponsor, and the sponsor was a government.

Start with F-Droid. A new UI would have made the headlines, but the change that matters is buried in the release notes. For years, installing an app from any store other than Google's was a worse experience by design, and the post says plainly what changed that:

F-Droid's volunteers did the engineering, a unified installer built on Android's new pre-approval API. Regulators made the API exist.

Gultsch's post is the most honest thing written about platform dependence this year. Conversations has been his living since March 2014, and Play Store revenue was the steady part of it; he used to say it paid his rent. It also came with 15% to Google, more than €1,000 a year, two removals from the store, and a 14-day wait for an update review as he was writing. He stayed, he says, for one reason: "economic dependency." What let him leave wasn't a surge of F-Droid users. It was NLnet and European Commission grants that fund him through the end of 2029.

DAWO is the plainest case, because the state is the customer and the builder at once. Its components live on code.overheid.nl under the Dutch interior ministry, and its pitch isn't a product. It's a principle: "An open workplace is made of replaceable building blocks." Every part can be inspected and swapped out.

The way off the platforms isn't being walked by users. It's being paved by procurement, regulation and grants.

The skeptic's objection writes itself, and some of it is right. Grant money is a patron like any other. Gultsch traded one landlord for another, and his runway has a date on it. Government IT has a long record of expensive desktops that nobody wanted to use, and Munich's LiMux, the best-known European attempt, went back to Windows. If the only thing holding up the alternative is a line in a budget, it's fragile.

Grant the fragility. The comparison still favors the new arrangement, for a reason Gultsch himself names: the old patron wouldn't answer the phone. His Google fee ran to half again what he pays for internet access, and when the connection breaks, someone drives out to fix it. A grant officer can be reached, a regulator can be petitioned, and a ministry's code sits in a public repository anyone can read. The Play Store offered none of that at any price. The new sponsors aren't more generous. They're more accountable, and accountability is the thing the platforms were never going to sell.

There is a lesson here for anyone betting on the alternative stacks, investors included. The deciding variable isn't whether open software can match the incumbents on polish; F-Droid 2.0 says it can get close. What decides it is whether someone with a budget or a statute has decided that exit is worth paying for. This week, in Europe, someone had.

Gultsch spent a decade staying for the rent. The rent is now paid by someone who answers the phone.