Re: <nettime> David Golumbia on "Cyberlibertarianism"

[Carsten Agger via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On Wed, 2026-08-26 at 15:43 +0200, Andre Rebentisch via nettime-l
wrote:
> 
> I read the posthumous publication a while ago, and upon reflection, I
> 
[...]
> Also, the notion of software freedom has to be tied (and seldom was)
> to 
> its origin: (highly educated) scientific researchers working (quite 
> autonomously) at expensive public data centres who are capable of 
> porting source code to a newly acquired machine themselves and
> skilled 
> enough to fix bugs, but are just not authorised to do so and rely on 
> software providers to do it for them, or the providers refuse to do
> it 
> for lack of capacity or commercial interest (the so-called software 
> crisis). The frictions and efficiency losses in the old data centre 
> environment were described as a lack of freedom. So the correct term
> may 
> be "agency" of computer professionals.
> 
> Free software has completely taken over and gone beyond the old Unix 
> world. Today, all top-100 supercomputers rely on free software. This
> had 
> little to do with consumer software purchases or software for office 
> productivity markets.

Thanks, André, these are good observations!


-- 
Carsten Agger - agger@fsfe.org
https://fsfe.org --- https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/ 
FSFE Denmark Coordinator, General Assembly & European Team Member

Blog & Podcast: freely.modspil.dk/agger --- podcast.modspil.dk
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