Ada & Zangemann is a book by Matthias Kirschner and Sandra Brandstatter that extols the benefits, fun, and importance of software freedom. A fun read for kids, it strives to instill a passion for inventing and tech into kids, and also has an important lesson for adults not to rely on any one person or organization for all their software needs.
The premise of the story is around the juxtaposition of Ada - a bright girl without the means to afford many of the fancy tech most other families have - and Zangemann - the inventor of said tech. Through necessity, Ada tinkers with broken gadgets and old bicycles to give them a new life and make up for her lack of fancy skateboards and ice cream machines that other children have. In her drive to build the solutions she wants and needs, Ada finds her passion for problem solving, and hardware and software development.
Zangemann, who is designed with an obvious reference to other high-tech oligarchs, is trapped by his own idiosyncrasies. He tends to go overboard in locking down devices to do only the things he wants to do - like his ice cream flavor of the day rather than letting people choose which flavor they want. He designs the products he likes, but wants them to be used in ways that only he deems appropriate. Obviously, the book is a bit over-the-top in some of the things Zangemann imposes on people, such as the iron that can't iron ties because Zangemann hates ties. That said many of the examples are probably more benign than the data and privacy society has given up to much of the tech giants of the world.
As the story progresses, Ada with her friends become more and more interested in tinkering with inventions and modding the many inventions that Zangemann sells. Zangemann becomes angry about the mods, and tries to get the government to step in and create laws to stop it. Ada and her friends, with the help of family protest, and over time end up not merely overturning the law, but also helping the government by creating new software without the limitations of the Zangemann tech. The government in the story saw the power Zangemann had over them with his digital monopoly, and our hero, Ada, was able to help out with her skills.
The story is a fun, inspiring adventure that I can relate to quite well. I want to be Ada! The political side is important as well, and speaks to the work Matthias Kirschner does as his day job as the President of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). This blog is really just designed to be a free resource to help people get off the ground and start learning about software, and honestly very little to none of the knowledge that I've learned would have been possible without free and open source software.
Ada & Zangemann is an approachable read that children and politicians alike can understand and hopefully take away some insight into the value of software freedom. Similar to this blog detailing my own experience learning about free tools and writing code, catching that feeling of "wow I built this" is incredibly important for young children. Free and open source code help enable the education, either in the classroom or self-taught, for those just getting started with technical development.
Free tools are resources that are essential for enabling more people to learn and develop new skills. It's very hard for many, myself included, to justify spending money on tools and software when I may not end up using it, or decide it's too difficult to learn, or I lose interest in something. However, if the tools are free, then one can use them and start to learn and develop one's skills further. If the tools are open source, then there is an even greater benefit because the code is more likely to have been peer reviewed, and more people can contribute so the project can become more permanent. Closed-source tools can always be stopped if the maintainer can no longer support the project. Open source is something that can always be maintained.
Ada & Zangemann has a political bent to it, but it is not wrong. Free software and open source are important and honestly need to be protected. This story helps spread that message in an approachable way, and I think is definitely worth a read for both kids and adults. After reading it with my son, he immediately started planning what he wanted to invent.
More info about the story can be found here: https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/index.en.html
No comments:
Post a Comment