Myself, Arch Project Leader Levente, ArchWiki maintainer Ferdinand (Alad), and FSFE's vice president Heiki at FOSDEM 2026 after I handed them over some hacker chocolate.

The ArchWiki is a resource, I myself and many people around me regularly consult - no matter if it is actually about Arch or another Free Software distribution. There are countless times, when I read articles there to get a better understanding of the tools I daily use, like e-mail programs, editors, or all kinds of window managers I used over time. It helped me to discover some handy features or configuration tips that were difficult for me to find in the documentation of the software itself.

Whenever I run into issues setting up a GNU/Linux distribution for myself or family and friends, the ArchWiki had my back!

Whenever I want to better understand a software, the ArchWiki is most often the first page I end up consulting.

You are one of the pearls of the internet! Or in Edward Snowden's words:

"Is it just me, or have search results become absolute garbage for basically every site? It's nearly impossible to discover useful information these days (outside the ArchWiki). " https://x.com/Snowden/status/1460666075033575425

Thank you, to all the ArchWiki contributors for gathering all the knowledge to help others in society to better understand technology and for the ArchWiki maintainers to ensure the long term availability and reliability of this crucial resource.

If you also appreciated the work of the ArchWiki maintainers for our society, tell them as well, and I encourage you to make a donation to Arch.

PS: Thanks also to Morton for connecting me with Ferdinand and Levente at FOSDEM.

This day was one of the greatest days in my life. I still get goose bumps, when I think about the moment when Laura Knöll, a moderator from German TV, was asking the children if we should start watching the movie and they were all shouting.

Thanks to Monika Rintelen here also a short video from the premiere (in German):

The whole movie is meanwhile available in different languages, on different platforms and also in DCP format for cinema screening thanks to the Lichtburg Essen.

The FSFE's plan is to produce more dubbed movies (for around 3600€ the movie can be dubbed if we have an existing translation).

A big thank you to Reinhard Wiesemann and all the people, organisations, and companies who made the movie possible:

I have spent many hours of my life reading books to children; within the family, at summer camps, and more recently at various events with the book I wrote, "Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream". I have personally read the book to over 2,200 children; which remains as one of the most fulfilling activities in my life. Beyond the joy and impact it brings to the children, these experiences give me so much energy, that I channel into my work, for example to contribute to the work of my colleagues to counter back Apple’s arguments against interoperability before the European Court of Justice.

Would you also like to spark children's interest in coding and software freedom? Would you like to explain to them concepts such as the right to repair, the value of collaboration, and why “Public Money? Public Code!” is important for our society? And would you like to be motivated by their response?

Then please join many of our volunteers who have already held readings, and spend some time in November and December this year reading the book to children around you. Either at home, at a school, a library, to children of your co-workers, or at a local hackerspace.

It is simple, get a copy of the book and start reading it to them! Or, since all our "Ada & Zangemann" materials are available as Open Education Resource, you can easily download the materials in your language. E.g. for English:

• The PDF slides
• The story with comments about when to change the slides
• plus some general tips and tricks about the readings

Due to the licensing of the book and the movie, it is difficult to measure the exact numbers. However, we are confident that we have reached over 5,800 children with readings of the book and screenings of the movie, that over 20,000 printed copies of Ada & Zangemann in 8 languages were distributed, and that at least more than 7,400 people watched the movies. But no matter how many we reached until now, every new child you reach with the story will make a difference!

"I believe kids need to understand tech not only from a user's perspective but as something that they can modify themselves. Ada & Zangemann is one of the few kids books that explains the idea of Free Software to the very young. Reading it is a lot of fun: seeing kids follow the story, and share their stories of tinkering with technology. In addition, the author of the book makes it super easy to run readings by making slides, colouring pages and the like freely available. Free Software strives from people collaborating: So does the story of the book from people sharing it." Isabel Drost-Fromm, who read the book to children at conferences.

Please, try it out yourself: Read the book to others and thereby empower them to shape their future with technology.

PS: If you really do not feel comfortable reading it yourself, here a few others actions you can take to help:

• Share your thoughts about the story with others with this sharepic generator
• Share the movie with others or even organise a screening
• Help with translating and proofreading additional languages so we can reach more children in their mother tongue
• Join other volunteers who gifted the book to public libraries, a school, youth club, hackerspace or repair café in their area - or who gifted it to friends and family. (thanks to our volunteers in Denmark, we covered 50% of all public libraries)
• If you do not have time for any of this, please donate to the FSFE (for €120€ we can send a pack with books and other materials to hand out to a school class for readings in Italy, for €3,600 we can transform an existing translation into the movie).

While many people in the movement for software freedom know about VI, VIM, NeoVim, or other flavours, for many people outside our movement this software is installed on their computers, but often without them actively installing it or noticing it as a separate component. There are no exact numbers, but with all the installations on GNU/Linux (servers, virtual machines, desktop, ... ), BSD and Unix systems, MacOS, Microsoft Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux) I feel comfortable to claim there are way more than 1 billion installations.

Matthias and Raphael at SFSCON 2024 asking all people in the audience to stand up if are using Vim, or have used Vim in the past. Matthias showing the VI M sign with his fingers - CC-BY-SA 4.0 NOI

While it is a "hidden software" for many out there, it is one of the most important tools for other; including myself. IIRC I started using the text editor Vim in 1999 when I installed my first GNU/Linux distribution. In an e-mail from July 2001, a friend complains that he had some encoding issues with a file I sent him, where I told him that I wrote it with Vim, in November 2001 I sent parts of my Vim config file to another person from our Free Software user group, and my first public post seems to be in 2002 when I engaged in discussions about Vim on the German Debian User mailing list (yes, I would today engage differently in such discussions).

For 25 years, a quarter of a decade, I almost daily write notes and e-mails using the Vim key bindings, all the papers at university (through Latex), almost everything that is published from my had its origin in a text file I edited the "Vim way". The commands are meanwhile part of my muscle memory.

In the preparation for the European SFS Award 2024 I had the honour of talking to many people who closely worked with Bram and with his family. To express my gratitude, let me quote the laudatio again, which was a quite emotional moment for me (if you prefer, you can also watch the video recording).

Matthias: It is an honor to present the European SFS Award 2024. The FSFE and LUGBZ worked together again this year to find a winner from all nominations. This year’s European SFS Award goes to someone whose work transformed how many interact with computers, creating a tool for Free Software contributors, developers, and creators. A tool that new users might be a little afraid of because it can be tricky to exit.

Raphael: (Yes, you may know the software we’re talking about.) A piece of code that makes every keystroke feel like a power move, where “Esc” is the most important key on your keyboard. Since its launch in 1991, this software has spread across more than 15 operating systems and is installed on millions of computers around the world.

Matthias: For our winner, efficiency of computer users was crucial. His mantra was: “Detect inefficiencies, find a quicker way, make it a habit!” and he helped many people to how to actually accomplish this. He went on to help those he met on mailing lists, at conferences like SFSCON in 2009, or at his workplace. He even talked to public administrations, so they actually use and thereby benefit from Free Software. He wanted to ensure that all software which is procured by public administrations is published under a Free Software license for the good of society.

Raphael: Educating others to empower them was also important for him outside of the technology field. He helped children in Uganda -- who often lost their parents due to HIV -- to get education at the Kibaale Community Centre. He enabled school education for many of them so they can take care about themselves and their families in the long run. He founded an NGO to collection donations for this work, even on his work desk there was a piggy bank so that visitors can easily donate.

Matthias: There was a huge online rivalry between the users of his software and those on the other side: those who used another "operating system" and who called his software the "editor of the beast". This rivalry became an enduring part of hacker culture and the Free Software community. A huge fan of Monty Pythons, this year's winner did not shy away from engaging in such banter.

Raphael: His dedication was enormous. His family will not forget the moments, in which he disappeared on Christmas day, because he "needed to fix some bugs". It gave him great pleasure to develop and use his software, and he wanted to help others to also experience this joy. "If you are happy, I am happy!" was one of his sayings. He took every opportunity to work on his projects, even while in the hospital.

Matthias:With his death on 3 August 2023 the Free Software community lost a person who enabled thousands of people to contribute efficiently to software freedom. We regret that he was not able to live longer with his beloved turtles, finishing his plans for a vacuum robot that could clean stairways, fixing bugs, implementing new features for the users of his software, and being here with us.

Raphael: For his remarkable contributions to software freedom the European SFS Award 2024 goes posthumously to Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vi IMproved -- or VIM.

Matthias: So, please join us in a big round of applause for Bram Moolenaar.

On today's "I love Free Software" day, let me thank again Bram Moolenaar for all the mentioned work. Thank you, Christian Brabandt and the other contributors who took the coordination of Vim after Bram passed away. Thank you to Sven Guckes (I wrote about his death in 2022) who helped me and others with many Vim questions plus showed me how to do the "VI M" with my fingers like in the picture above, and thank you to all the people from projects like NeoVIM, Nvi, Busybox Vi, who develop and maintain their Vi flavour.

Matthias thanking Bram Moolenaar on stage at SFSCON 2024 with picture of Bram coding on Vim in the background - CC-BY-SA 4.0 NOI

On 4 December 2023, the French Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, presented the book "Ada & #Zangemann" to the APFA parliamentarians meeting in the old Bonn parliament. Afterwards he gifted the book to Anke Rehlinger, Minister President of the Saarland (Germany). Below you see the French video (thanks Erik da Silva and Dario Presutti with several subtitles).

The book was covered in a radio interview by "Radio France", in several articles, including Le Monde, ZDnet, or blogs, as well as TV coverage at Sqool TV with Alexis Kauffmann, from the French Ministry of Education and the person who started with the idea of the French translation.

I was honoured that David Revoy painted this great version of Ada, published under Creative Commons by share alike as well (high resolution and source files also available).

David is doing really great illustration; with his comic Pepper & Carrot as well as with other great work for example for the French organisation Framasoft to promote software freedom. He also publishes his work under the Creative Commons by share alike license.

Furthermore, if you are interested how to create artwork with Free Software, with tools like Krita, also check out his website as he is publishing a lot of tutorials and tools. Below you see his recording of the progress of the Ada illustration which he published on the fediverse.

Rayan (Alès), Matteo (Besançon), Rozenn (Guingamp), Louna (Paris)... more than a hundred students, aged 13 to 19, from four different schools in France, translated this book from German into French over the course of the 2022-2023 school year, sharing the work and coordinating it using online tools.

On 7 December, Sandra Brandstätter, the illustrator, and I were invited to participate in an online meeting organised by the French Ministry of Education, with several of the pupils attending, who translated the book. It was amazing to hear that they have spent several weeks on the project; including writing their own story when they have just seen the illustrations of the book, discussing the characters Ada and Zangemann, the connection of the story to real world development, and of course the translation itself. It was great to have the chance to be there with them and thank some of them personally.

I would like to thank all the people who help to promote the book. Especially, thank you to Alexis Kauffmann from the French Ministry of Education and founder of Framasoft for initialising this project, C & F éditions for publishing it, ADEAF (Association pour le développement de l'enseignement de l'allemand en France) for coordinating the project, the teachers for spending so much time and energy into the project, and most importantly all the pupils who did such a great work!

The feedback about the book was great, especially the fact that all the materials to read aloud yourself, presentation slides with the illustrations, and the texts with markers to change slides are available in our git repository (thanks to the many contributors who made it possible that the book is meanwhile available in Arabic, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Ukrainian, and Valencian, and there are more translation efforts going on).

Furthermore I had many interesting conversations with Jessica Wawrzyniak and Leena Simon, who wrote books about digital topics in German-- so we thought we team up and raise awareness about the books, and the ways how you can use them to foster digital rights.

• Jessica Wawrzyniak's book is the children's and young people's encyclopedia "#Kids #digital #genial - Protect yourself and your data!" (in German), which in more than 150 short entries explain terms from the media world and opens up political, economic and social contexts, and her book "Screen Teens - How we accompany young people into digital responsibility" (in German)

• Leena Simon's "Digital Literacy - How we save the world with a new attitude" (in German) in which she shows ways in which people can self-determined work for freedom and democracy in a digital world.

One occasion to make use of those books is now Friday, 17 November, which is the nationwide Read Aloud Day in Germany, when everyone is encouraged to read to children in a kindergarten, school, library or other social institution. Together with Digitalcourage e.V. the FSFE support this nice tradition and we are promoting the reading of available books that highlight important aspects of digital rights on this day.

As Jessica Wawrzyniak, media educator at Digitalcourage wrote "Topics relating to digitization, media use and data protection are not yet sufficiently addressed in daycare centers, schools and social institutions, but they can be addressed in a child-friendly way."

In recent months, I read the book to over 1000 children. It was always a great fulfilment to discuss the book with the participants, and see how they are afterwards motivated to tinker, be creative, while they still also think about topics like equality, inclusion, democracy and activism.

Children and young people should be encouraged to stand up for their basic rights, including the right to informational self-determination, and to shape the information technology world in a self-determined and responsible way -- which includes Free Software.

So we encourage you to grab one of those books, or others you enjoy which are suitable for reading to children and young adults, read it to others, and have discussions with them.

If you live in Germany, you can use the 17 November. But do not feel limited by that. Reading books to others and discussing topics, you feel are important for society, should not be limited to one day.

The photos were taken in a school at a hospital run by an international medical organisation that operates in the Middle East and showed children reading the Arabic translation of Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream.

The hospital does surgery for "war victims, mostly people who have lost a limb (often because of a landmine) or suffered burns (usually because of bombings)." The pictures showed children from surrounding countries (Yemen, Syria, Irak mostly) who because of their condition usually have to stay at hospital away from their country for several months, often years.

"So while I can't guarantee that thousands of kids will read those copies of the book, I can promise that they do make a huge difference for the kids who do. Most of them have a 3d printed arm or leg, or a compression mask to help with burn healing. I suspect that the concept of being able to tinker with software and tools around them will ring a bell (the prosthetics you see in the video above are all 3D printed on site by [the organisation])." (The quotes are from the e-mail I received.)

For the book, Wiebke (editor), Sandra (illustrator) and I spent significant time to discuss the inclusiveness of the characters. Sandra's experience with inclusiveness was one of the reasons why I approached her: to see if she would like to work with us on the book: considering inclusiveness without distracting the reader from the main story. Receiving this e-mail, and looking at the pictures showed me again that every minute we spent on thinking about inclusiveness was worth it.

A lot of people will not realise it when they read the book and look at the illustrations, but taking a closer look, you will realise that one of the characters in the book is using a 3d printed leg. For readers with physical impairments, this tiny detail can make a huge difference.

This still feels a bit like a wonderful dream to me and I am so thankful it all worked out. I hope you will enjoy reading the book yourself and to others, that you share it with children around you to inspire their interest in tinkering with software and hardware and encourage them to shape technology themselves. I also hope, that it serves as a useful gift for your family, friends, and co-workers because it explores topics you care about, and that you also appreciate that it is published under Creative Commons By Share Alike.

“A rousing tale of self-reliance, community, and standing up to bullies…software freedom is human freedom!” —Cory Doctorow, Sci-Fi Author

“Introduces readers young and old to the power and peril of software. Behind it all is a backdrop of ethics of knowledge sharing upon which the arc of human history rides.” —Vint Cerf, Computer Scientist and One of the Inventors of the Internet

“In this hopeful story Ada and her friends join a movement that started back in 1983. Their courageous adventure of software freedom and learning how technology works is a wonderful way to introduce young people everywhere to the joys of tinkering!” —Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation

“Even as a non-child, I was captivated by the story from the first page to the last. Kudos to the author for packaging difficult topics such as monopolies, lobbyism, digital divide, software freedom, digital autonomy, IoT, consumer control, e-waste and much more in a child-friendly form in an easily understandable and exciting storyline.” —Jörg Luther, chief editor of the German Linux-Magazin, LinuxUser, and Raspberry Pi Geek

If you are from the US you can pre-order the hardcover from No Starch Press, get 25% off with the coupon code, receive the DRM free ebook now, and get the book sent from the US in starting in December.

If you live outside the US there are other options. According to the current plan, by the end of 2022, you should be able to pre-order the book from local bookstores worldwide, so the book does not have to be shipped from the US. Those bookstores should then be able to ship the book from ~May 2023 onwards.

Such a book would not be possible without the help of many people and without space restrictions, I can be a bit more verbose in thanking them (and I am pretty sure I unfortunately still forgot some: if so, please let me know):

Many thanks to Reinhard Wiesemann from the Linuxhotel for the financial support and motivation to no longer plan but to make. Thanks to Sandra Brandstätter, who has brought me joy with every new design for the illustrations. Thanks to my editor Wiebke Helmchen, who made developing and sharpening the story fun, and to No Starch Press, and my German publisher d.punkt / O'Reilly guiding me through the whole process of publishing a book and for agreeing to publish the book under a free culture license.

Thanks to Bea and Benni, Christine and Marc, Bernhard Reiter, Isabel Drost-Fromm and Amelia, Katta, Kristina, Martin, Mona and Arne, Nina, Oliver Diedrich, Reinhard Müller, Sabine, and Torsten Grote for great ideas, inspiration, and practical tips.

Thanks to my collegues and volunteers from the FSFE, and the team at d.punkt / O'Reilly who helped a lot to promote the book to a larger audiences.

For the English version a special thanks goes to Cory Doctorow, Brian Osborn, and Vint Cerf for helping me find the right publisher, to John Sullivan for his valuable feedback for language improvements, to Luca Bonessi for his great help with maintaining the git repository for the book, Catharina Maracke and Till Jaeger for their help with Creative Commons licensing with the German version and the many hours in which Pamela Chestek helped No Starch Press and myself to optimise the contract for CC-BY-SA.

Thanks to Bill Pollock and the team at No Starch Press for working on all those many details included in book publishing, from editing, production, marketing, sales, and all the other nitty-gritty details that are often not recognized by readers, but that make a huge difference.

Thanks to the many people of the Free Software movement in general and all the volunteers and staffers of the FSFE, from whom I was allowed to learn and whose engagement motivated me so that this book can inspire children’s interest in tinkering and encourage them to shape technology.

Finally, thanks to my family, who made me write early in the morning, late in the evening, and on holiday, and who always supports my work for software freedom. Especially, I would like to thank my children, who inspired me with new ideas at each reading. Without them, this book would not exist.

For additional information about the book, please visit the FSFE's website about it. All royalties of the book will go to the charitable FSFE and supports the FSFE's work for software freedom.

The first one was on 2 June at the public library in Cologne Porz, which also acts as a makerspace. There I was reading the book to visitors of the public library, which resulted in a quite diverse audience considering age and technical background.

At this reading, I also for the first time met the people from O'Reilly with whom I worked in the last months: my editor Ariane Hesse and Corina Pahrmann, who is doing the marketing for the book. So I had the opportunity to thank the two of them in person for all the great work they did to write and market the book.

Here is the nice view while preparing for the reading next to the library at the Rhine.

On 9 June, I was doing a reading at the re:publica 22 conference in Berlin. The reading took place in the fablab bus, which is a mobile hackerspace to reach young people in areas which do not have local hackerspaces. Briefly before the start of the reading, Volker Wissing, the German Federal Minister for Digital Affairs visited the bus. We had a quick chat with the children and briefly talked with him about the book, tinkering, and the self-determined use of software. As he was interested in the book, I gave him one of my copies I had with me.

After the reading there was a longer discussion with the children and adults about ideas for another book on the topic.

Finally, on 24 June, on the Germany's federal digital day, the city of Offenburg invited me to do a reading of the book. In the beginning it was planned to read the book towards 2 school classes. But over the time more and more teachers contacted the organisers and expressed interest to also participate in the reading with their classes. In the end, the reading took place in the largest cinema room in the city of Offenburg with over 150 third-graders from different schools in Offenburg and the Chief Mayor Marco Steffens was doing the introduction.

As with the other readings I did until now, the part I enjoy the most, are the questions and comments by children. Although I also enjoy the discussions with grown-ups, it is so encouraging to see how children think about the topics of the book, what ideas and plans they have. In the end the organisers had to stop the discussion, because the children had to go back to school. I was also amazed how concentrated the children were following the story for the 35 minutes of the reading before we had the discussion.

The room before the reading, which can fit 365 people, and which offered enough room to have some space between the different classes.

Some stickers and bookmarks I brought with me in front of the room:

Chief Mayor Marco Steffens was doing an introduction before my reading:

Myself at the reading, while showing one of my favourite illustrations by Sandra Brandstätter:

After the reading I joined the people from the local hackerspace Section 77 at their booth for the Digital Day and had further interesting discussions with them and other people attending the event.

I am already looking forward to future readings of the book and discussions with people, young and old, about the topics of the book.

Nevertheless, I had great online discussions about the topic of the talk, which encouraged me to think about how we can condense the message of the talk further to reach more people with it -- maybe with a short video similar to our "Public Money? Public Code!" video. When one person, who already before sent me kudos for my FOSDEM talk, heard about it, he offered to make a larger donation to cover the costs for such a video.

Alexander Lehmann, who also created the FSFE's "Public Money? Public Code!" video, was available with his team to work on the implementation of the video. It was a great pleasure to work with them on the video and find a way how to condense a 30-minutes talk into a short video.

We published this short "The Core Values of Software Freedom" video during the FSFE's 20-year anniversary, which was also the introduction of the FSFE's self-hosted peertube instance.

Afterwards, we received some feedback that people like the video, but would prefer an even shorter one and suggested shortening the existing video and make a few adjustments. After many people in the FSFE core team agreed to this, we again worked with Alexander Lehmann on the adjustments.

This week we published it: a video explaining the essential four rights to use, study, share, and improve software. Rights that help to support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press, and privacy. And all of that in less than 3 minutes, so the video can easily be shared whenever you want to quickly explain the topic to others.

Please share the video with friends, colleagues, and the public on different channels, embed it on your website with the provided code snippets, let us know how you like it by commenting, and if you see it on platforms which you are using, by rating the video there.

By doing this, you increase the chance that the video will be seen and recommended to people who have never heard of software freedom before. Help them learn what Free Software is, in less than 3 minutes!

Thank you.