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Maybe he should have watched what you said in Revolution OS.

I agree that compared to you and others, he was terribly late to the party. Still, by the time he did his keynote to fose in 2006, he seemed to be starting to 'get it'.

1) Pirates is a dramatization, and a poorly-written, highly inaccurate one. Hardly scholarly material.

2) Why did kellyb9 get modded down for his/her comment about Pirates? Stupid iMods? The comment in true and insightfully shows how stupid, poorly-written and inaccruate that Pirates is.

3) Stuff I have read/watched/listened to that is scholarly, including the aforementioned Triumph of the Nerds, one or more unauthorized biographies of Bill Gates, and some of the original periodicals from the day all say the opposite is true -- people ripped off Gates' code, he didn't rip off anybody elses.

4) I haven't seen Revolution OS (yet! can't wait for my DVD to arrive -- thanks!) but from what I saw on their website, I'd have to say that any material about Bill Gates in the movie is likely to be just a wee bit biased, don'tchathink? Gates did make unauthorized use of Harvard's computing facility to write Altair BASIC.

Ever watch Revolution OS? At some conference (I think it was either LinuxWorld or O'Reilly) RMS was in the middle of giving a speech, and Linus started chasing his kid around the stage directly behind RMS. RMS, on the other hand, was polite, smiled, and continued his speech without even flinching.

And don't even get me started on all the times where Linus talks about himself as the "practical" one, even though he doesn't seem to care enough about practical issues like copyright law to actually bother to learn something about them (or to consult a lawyer) before blabbering to the media. (The way Linus labels legal issues as "unimportant" smells more like idealism than pragmatism to me...)

In my opinion, RMS has the physical appearance of a hippie-zealot, and Linus takes advantage of that to mislead people who don't know better. I think RMS has every right to complain.

Wake me when the regular person can download a DRM free song from a major service of some crappy music that is really popular like Justin Timerberlake (dick in a box!). I'm sick of people telling me that I can get OGG Vorbis or FLAC encoded crap for free... yet it is just a bunch of Grateful Dead and Phish shows or worse.. some indie band that has no production or talent.

At least I can listen to the "The Free Software Song" by RMS himself at http://www.revolution-os.com/musicvideo.html

No DRM whatsoever.. No talent either!!!

I can't believe that none of you slashnerds have mentioned Revolution OS.

I always watch it when i get miserable and it does the job. http://www.revolution-os.com/ also i have seen a movie with Microsoft and Apple when they started [Bill Gates is really cool there] but i don't remember the name of it.

Steal This film

IN 2006, A GROUP OF FRIENDS DECIDED TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT FILESHARING THAT *WE* WOULD RECOGNISE. THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW DOCUMENTARIES BY 'OLD MEDIA' CREWS WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND THE NET AND SEE PEER-TO-PEER ORGANISATION AS A THREAT TO THEIR LIVELIHOODS. THEY HAVE NO REASON TO REPRESENT THE FILESHARING MOVEMENT POSITIVELY, AND NO CAPACITY TO REPRESENT IT LUCIDLY.

"Avoid all needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon." -- Steal This Book
"Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire."
"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."
"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."

FTR, the FSF have released a video of that talk (about the GNU GPL v3 draft and very informative as well as funny). The torrent of the video is at http://gplv3.fsf.org/av/gplv3-draft1-release.ogg.t orrent.

If anyone is looking for videos of RMS, the movie, RevolutionOS (2 CSS-free DVDs for $27) has a lot of footage of RMS as well as other pioneers in the movement.

Hopefully the FSF will take videos of talks in the future now. I suspect this hasn't been done before due to practical reasons (e.g.: needing a good videocam & cameraman).

I'm reminded of a movie called Revolution OS which enlightened me to Gates' history with hobbyists.

Remember the open letter to hobbyists that Gates penned on the third of February, nineteen seventy six?

A choice selection of his letter:
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written.

And for those of you that hate reading the word of Gates, I'll paraphrase the above for you in fewer words:

Remember, don't you dare try to write your own software. Leave that to me. Then buy it from me. Any resistance to this shows that you are ruining the software industry as we know it. If we fool everyone into thinking they need to pay us money for software, then we can rape the world, are you blind?

Look what you've done! You horrible hobbyists. You steal software. You make technology do what you want it to do. You write and distribute freely. For shame.

*Gates shakes rolled up newspaper at the world*

No DRM for you. No. Bad hobbyist. Get.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Slightly offtopic, but I stumbled over something on this site and that leads to a plea:

Could someone please have a look at the
"The Free Software Song" music video and tell me if it's save to watch?
Subtext:

"The Free Software Song" is performed by the office park band, The GNU/Stallmans.
The lyrics are by Richard Stallman. The music video is a three minute-long, 28 mb MPEG file.


I don't dare to.

Many thanks.

Linus Torvalds was kind of inspired by minix to create a more useable and extensible Open Source OS and the original source for the Linux Kernel was written using a minix install. Check out the DVD of RevolutionOS for a detailed history.

Open Source IS what you want to sell. Start with the proprietary licenses, you'll be amazed what you find if you're actually able to read what it is that you've bought (a license). Example: One of the arguments you'll hear against OSS is lack of warranty, yet most proprietary licenses exclude warranty of merchantability.

Include the story of Ernie Ball, a great example of one of the risks of proprietary software.

Get a few copies of Revolution OS to pass around. Those who can't sit still long enough to read may be able to be captivated by TV.

Open protocols are more important than open source. Avoid vendor lock-in. If your information is in a proprietary protocol, who really owns it?

As the leader of the Apache project, Brian Behlendorf is quite high profile.

If you haven't seen Revolution OS purchase it, watch it, lend it to your friends.

Behlendorf is interviewed extensively in it, comes across well, is extremely eloquent and has a lot of worthwile things to say. His most interesting comment from my perspective was that the primary focus of Apache was to support open standards as opposed to free software.

As the posting says, there is no fee to attend. The costs of this year's picnic have been picked up by Oracle.

And a bit of trivia: the Sunnyvale Baylands Park where the picnic is held is also one of the sites where filming took place for Revolution OS. For anyone who's interested, we can show you the boardwalk area where the interviews with Michael Tiemann of Cygnus (now CTO of RedHat) took place.

This one right?

Revolution OS

They did the same thing when slashdot and others tried the Refund trick a few years ago as documented in the fine film 'Revolution OS'. They had a table with free coffee and a banner that read 'Microsoft welcomes the Open Source community' (or some such thing). The Theory is very sound, if you duck an issue you get pissed off people, if you at least greet a attack with some grace it defuses the force of the argument. It's social aikido. You just can't punch out someone who offers you coffee....

As for the possibility that the DVD will be region-free, I was at the screening in Pasadena three weeks ago. J.T.S. Moore did a little Q&A at the end of the film; in response to a question, he did mention that a region-free, CSS-free release is a possibility that's being considered. From what I gathered, the decision isn't yet final. I also gathered that he doesn't have much love for the movie cartel. Neither the movie site nor iFilm mentioned specific release dates or prices.

(If it becomes available, I'd buy it. I liked it, and I'm not the open-source zealot that some people around here are (I tend to use whatever's appropriate for the task at hand). If a large enough number of copies get sold and it doesn't turn up on Gnutella, maybe it'll be a small lesson to the movie cartel about treating your customers right.)

How could they have GIF's on the movie's website when one of the main stars is RMS. You think there would be a clause about that in his contract.

Why did they change the name of the documentary?

In Sweden and Finland it was called The Code. http://www.linuxthemovie.com

Why change it to Revolution OS? http://www.revolution-os.com

It's nice to see OSS moving to the mainstream, if only on a cable channel. The web site has a lot of reviews but doesn't really suggest a mainstream audience. Probably it would be mostly people who are power users of Windows or else programmers who already understand the significance of OSS. I hope it does signify a trend, though.