Are you talking about Ladybird?

The US government is a mess but US companies still have all the money. Most Canadian companies have US revenues and will benefit from US deductions.

The first big Ladybird sponsor was Shopify. They are a Canadian company that recently moved their headquarters to the US.

Agree with your last sentence.

My point is that Apple dominates that list of developers (and them and Google before that). How much do you think BlackBerry is contributing these days?

Since we are talking history though, one of the original KHTML devs was Andreas Kling who went on to work on WebKit at Apple and who now leads the Ladybird browser project. He lives in Sweden so I guess Ladybird is European though the newly formed Ladybird Foundation is US based (I am sure to make it easier to raise money by offering US tax deductions).

Sure Blink is a fork of WebKit which is a fork of KHTML. But that was 1000 years ago. The biggest contributors by leagues are Google and Apple. Those are US projects. Trying to say they are European is nuts.

LibreOffice is German though and while OpenOffice was from Oracle, it was based on StarOffice which was German. So, the EU can claim that one.

NextCloud is a solid example too.

And, of course, there is SUSE.

Igalia (Spain) brings Servo (web browser) and Chimera Linux too.

Governments do not have to be involved in projects to pass laws that impact them.

I would argue greater EU participation in FOSS would improve the situation. One, the number of people in the government that understand how FOSS works may increase and frankly ignorance is often the problem. Second, if lawmakers themselves or the things they care about rely on FOSS, they will be much less likely to kick the legs out from under it.

From a code perspective, the risk is low. If it is just that they add back doors (not because it is the law), we simply create versions without those back doors and use that instead.

I do not think that developers have any greater insight into social or legal issues than you do.