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RevolutionOS: The Linux Movie?
xmutex writes "Wired has a story about a documentary concerning the history of Linux and the open-source movement." I've heard bits and pieces from people at LWCE about the movie, but won't know for myself until I get a chance to see it. I guess its airing tonight in NY, and if you're at the show, you can get tickets from the OSDN booth.
Moore thinks the open source development model is here to stay, but is not convinced it will become completely dominant. He believes that it will probably co-exist with the closed source model.
This is what I also believe. No matter how much we call it a revolution, these are two sides of the same coin and one cannot exist without the other. And lets not forget that some of the Open source software concepts were derived from closed source products. And another thing that is mentioned is that the main rival to Open Source is not Microsoft. The main rival is not even a corporate entity. I would say the main rival to Open source is the public not being educated enough to accept it. And user experience.
Atleast this would be far far better than the stupid geeks in Antitrust. Gosh, I swear if someone hadnt knocked off that "Open Source fanatic" geek, I would have done it myself
My two cents.
Rapid Nirvana
Ok d00dz - start posting the links to DivX;-) Files NOW. We WANT to see this movie.
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Actually, when I first read the article I thought it said the movie was done by Michael Moore of Roger and Me fame. That might have been cute: Roger trying to get an interview with Bill Gates and in the meantime showing the downtrodden IT workers that have to deal with the crap his company spews...
How will it do that? He's not in it, or narrating it, or anything.
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You could make this initially boring premise look pretty cool with a Matrix-style gang of subversive programmers cracking content, and people being killed through lack of critical information the moment they need it. You could throw in some "clues" about what the movie was alluding to - names of black-hats would be Valenti, Kaplan, et al. The programmers group could be called DeCSS or something similar.
I wonder how far a kick-ass movie script with the above would get in Hollywood before someone realises what it's about and quietly kills the project?
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"
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...be able to prevent it from being nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar? That'd be a riot. Imagine RMS delivering the acceptance speech. Or better yet, Jon Johannsen. And Jackass Valenti's reaction.
[Fade in on Gates and Jobs sitting in a car on a city street]
Jobs: I heard you were in Europe recently?
Gates: Yeah. It's like America, but there's a lot of little differences though.
Jobs: Like what?
Gates: For example, you know what they call a mouse in France?
Jobs: You mean they don't call it a mouse?
Gates: Naw, the language difference. They call it 'le souris.'
Jobs: That's pretty fscked up. Now let's kill some people.
[Cue music]
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Piracy might be an issue because it's only a short line of thought from "Software ought to be free" to "Software ought to be free, and if it isn't, I'm taking it anyway, cuz 1 4m 1337 cr4X0r!", although the meaning of "free" is quite different from each other in those contexts. So if some pirate groups start distributing warez in the name of " freeing the software" it could shed a bad light on the whole OS/FS movement. Anyone with a bit of common sense would be able to tell the difference, but since when has common sense been a criterium to become a PHB? :-) Most people don't even know the differences between hackers, crackers, warez d00dz and script k1dd13z...
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Cthulhu fhtagn!
The <A HREF="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb .txt"> first law </A> of entertainment is to have a conflict drive the plot.
The better techie movies have character conflicts
at their core. Pirates of Silicon Valley is one
about the rivalry of the PC founders. Anti-trust
was another with a conflict between an evil
closed-source mogul and a open-source newbie.
Open source software concepts were derived from closed source products
Actually, you're wrong. Before Microsoft, before Sun, before UNIX, there WAS no commercial software. There was no "Open Source". ALL software was free (speech and beer) because they didn't even have a concept of it being different. Not to say that in today's world, commercial software hasn't made a place for itself but dont believe for a second that it came first.
God Fucking Damnit
The one part of the article which turned my head was Moore's statement that "If the voluntary ideals of the open source movement are further corrupted by a subculture of intellectual property theft, then the whole movement will be tainted. The owners of intellectual property will continue to fight the movement rather than cooperate with it." It kinda makes me think that even after this documentary (which I may never see unless it gets aired on Discovery Channel someday), J.T.S. Moore just doesn't get it. The whole point of the Free Software movement is not so much voluntary programming for fun as it is to get away from these notions of intellectual property, once and for all. There is a very large and very vocal segment of the Free Software movement which indeed laughs at all notions of "intellectual property" and whose spirit is the very antithesis of the owning of information: The Free Software Foundation. The fact that this was the organization that spearheaded the revolution should not have escaped Moore, and that this undercurrent of hostility to the concept of "intellectual property" pervades the hacker subculture now more than ever (a brief look at some of the articles and comments that appear here on /. should convince anyone beyond doubt).
If Moore had decided to read some of the texts on the philosophy of the GNU project, the GNU Public License, or even recent /. articles (and their attendant comments) on intellectual property issues (such as DeCSS) he would be convinced that the very idea of "intellectual property" and the ownership of information of any kind is fundamentally incompatible with and repugnant to the ideals of the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is not just about free software, but free exchange of ideas. The owners of intellectual property are concerned with restricting such an exchange of ideas for their personal gain. Both sides are obviously mutually and diametrically opposed, though Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens have managed to negotiate an uneasy peace under the banner of "Open Source." It remains to be seen whether this compromise will last, but it is my belief that this war of ideology will continue until one side's power is broken for good.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
AMC is a commercial chain - Here is the information you asked for. (and more)
As seen at amctheaters.com
(To Recap) If you are in NYC, then:
Revolution O.S. will be sneak-previewed Thursday night at Manhattan's AMC Empire 25 Theater, at 8:30.
Those attending LinuxWorld this week can pick up tickets at the OSDN booth (#3000) in the dot-org pavilion.
So where is it exactly?
AMC Empire 25
234 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
(212)398-3939
Subway: A, C, E to 42nd St -
Port Authority; N, R, S, 1, 1, 3, 7, 9 to 42nd Str
I guess the subway directions make perfect sense if you live in NYC
The first public screening of the film will be at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 12. Moore said people who would like to see the film should feel free to call "and pester" film distributors such as Miramax, Lions Gate in Los Angeles, and Cowboy Booking International in New York. "If enough people say they want to see the film, maybe they will distribute it," Moore said.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think the Heston reference must be tongue in cheek. Moore refers to his movie as an "epic". Heston is famous for his roles in epic movies like Ben Hur, or wannabe epics like most of his other movies. In Soylent Green, Heston gives a performance of unsurpassed hamminess - surely its mention is a clue that this is a joke?
I still wake up screaming at night, thinking that I am in the theater watching Anti-Trust. That was just a down right dreadful movie.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Instead of Linux on these machine, the directors have chosen to install the new MovieOS from Miranda. Not only delivers it much better visualisation on camera (20 columns width), it can even be put on one standard 1.44MB diskette (High Density of course).
I hope MovieOS will soon be opensource, so we can enjoy it too.
This is a replacement signature.
Hmm, cool. Who's going to be Linus? Tom Hanks? :-)
I read this wired story and thought about posting to Slashdot, but thought 'No, who wants to read about a Pirates of Silicon Valley' with Linux geeks and FSF heads.'
Apparently this is more a documentary, albeit narrated by old Six-shooter Chuck Heston himself, but my thought holds true. Regardless of how important you feel the history of the FS and OS movements are, a documentary about them belongs on latenight PBS or Discovery.
"Get your filthy paws off me, you damn, dirty MFC Coder!"
I think this is going to be received about as well as *any* documentary that goes to the bigscreen. IE: It will be shown only in art houses and campus theaters in very large cities. It will expose a *few* people to the ethos behind FS and OS, but not nearly as much as the Linux/FS community would hope.
If it does achieve any kind of success, it will be in the same vein as 'Trekkies'. People will see it as just another movie about geeks.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Revolution O.S. will be sneak-previewed Thursday night at Manhattan's AMC Empire 25 Theater, at 8:30. Those attending LinuxWorld this week can pick up tickets at the OSDN booth (#3000) in the dot-org pavilion.
I imagine it will be quite a party!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The article was going along well (well, besides the Heston mention), until he starts blathering about piracy. Piracy? What does Open Source/Free Software have to fear from *piracy*? Does he mean that corporations will take Free Software and use it in proprietary products, hence "stealing" the IP of the original authors? Or instead, is he blabbing incoherently about how Free Software is itself a threat to intellectual property of proprietary content producers? Seems like the latter...and if so, what type of advocate is he? Isn't the whole basis for a lot of the copyright and IP reform that digital content is different from physical objects in *type* not just *degree*? I.e., because "taking" a digital creation does not deprive the owner of the original, theft does not apply, and we are in a whole different ballpark.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Bill Gates was actually played by Anthony Michael Hall (Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, SNL briefly). Noah Wiley of ER played Steve Jobs.
I saw a preview of this movie, and my favorite scene was at the Amsterdam airport where RMS and Linux came to blows as to whether Gnu/Linux or Linux was correct.
When RMS had Linux in a headlock, I thought it was all over, until Tove gave him a flying dropkick upside his hippy head.
Right, after the MPAA just got done clobbering the Open-source community for DeCSS and LiVid, they're going to distribute a movie about us©©©
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
I see one very large problem being created by this movie, err, documentary.
If this makes Charlton Heston the publicly known voice for the open source community, I am going to shoot myself.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
"Don't get me wrong, no one is gonna mistake my cinematography in Revolution O.S. for a slick Hollywood film, but at least it doesn't have the amateur porno aesthetic of DV."
An amateur porno film with an OSS theme now that would have rocked.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
If he could play both the professor in Brainstorm and the massively psychopathic angel Gabriel in The Prophecy, he can almost project Gates' emotionless drive to rule the world by owning its core technology.
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