Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

Posted May 14, 2008 14:53 UTC (Wed) by zooko (guest, #2589)
Parent article: Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

I'm quite pleased with my sons's OLPC XO's.  (From G1G1.)

I'm thinking I might buy a used OLPC for myself.  It's too bad that more G1G1 style
deployments aren't currently happening so that more children that my sons know could also have
OLPC XO's.  For one thing, my son and I are hacking on some games for them, and we would get
more good hacking done if we had more people to share with.

Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

Posted May 14, 2008 15:44 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (1 responses)

How old is your son? Hacking FLOSS already? Nice.

Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

Posted May 14, 2008 16:34 UTC (Wed) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

Yeah, he is 7, and has added (with my help) eight new player species to Dungeon Crawl.  (All
eight are different colors of the Draconian species.)

Last night he insisted that we start making a new branch of the dungeon, a branch populated by
Small Mammals of all colors.  It's kind of a drag that he always wants to do more programming,
when I would rather just play Dungeon Crawl.  (Just kidding.)

To swerve back onto the topic of this LWN.net article, I personally feel that it is important
that the software that he is hacking on, and the tools that he uses to do it, are Free and
Open.  His education includes "strategic" or "moral" aspects as well as specific skills, and I
think it is valuable for him to get used to the idea that he, personally, has the power to dig
down underneath whatever it is that he is looking at in order to understand or change it.  If
he instead got used to the idea that his options were limited by other people's policies about
what he should be allowed or disallowed from doing, then I feel that this would be bad for his
long-term development.  Such an environment would be, in my humble opinion as a
parent/educator, be bad for his education.