Also shorting before could be seen as insider trading, right? Not that something being illegal means it wouldn’t happen, but feels like that would be hard to hide.

What I don’t understand about the whole thing is who ends up holding the bag of all that debt?

Like banks that lend them billions must be intelligent enough to know how private equity takeovers like this work. So if they lend them money, they surely would want to get that off their books asap. But who do they sell it to? I can’t imagine there is any type of reinsurance for this, since insurance providers should know even better.

I imagine some of the debt is to employees and small contractors, but can that really account for such a massive sum?

Honestly, imo they wouldn’t even need to get off Twitter and other platforms completely. Just make their own mastodon instance (or something similar that they control themselves) the primary source of truth and place of interaction. They could still link and reference it on other platforms to increase visibility, but make sure that all primary information is in a freely accessible place and not beholden to unreliable entities.

Or an established player in the market that wants to keep competitors out (but I guess in a way that is someone who dislikes change). While legislation like this can sometimes be great (e.g. the recent changes forcing longer support for mobile phones) there comes a point where it cuts the other way and it becomes an entry barrier.

Imo the better solution would be to legislate what happens after support ends. Like forcing the disclosure of at least some documentation that allows others to continue servicing the product or at least transfer out data and install other software on the device.

Agreed. I hope this gains even more traction. Building a digital economy around support and service of free open source software with the requirement of personnel being local seems like the best way for Europe to finally become competitive.