Hello there,
I'm a software engineer in my early 40s, born and raised in Switzerland.
When I grew up, computers and software were something you bought and owned. We went to a brick-and-mortar store to buy a computer game in a big box which, apart from often coming with nice goodies, contained the entire game. We knew that, as long as we took good care of those floppy disks or CD-ROMs, we would be able to play these whenever we wanted, for as long as we wanted, for the rest of our lives (as long as we could figure out how to cram the darn Sound Blaster driver, MSCDEX, and mouse driver into memory all at once, while still leaving free the excessive 608 kB of conventional memory the game greedily asked for).
We could borrow, swap, and sell stuff when we wanted to. We could tinker, modify, and learn. It pains me to think that personal computing is losing this utopian promise, and is being turned into yet another passive, over-commercialised consumer media, where conglomerates with anything but an educated and empowered public at heart decides what, how and when that public gets to consume "content".
I'm going to take any chance I get to fight back. Real personal computing is not just about nostalgia, or nerddom. It's about what computer freaks have been preaching since the 1970s: knowledge and sharing, communication and understanding, sovereignty and possibilities, arts and culture.
Let's claw back the techno-optimist future we saw coming!