My fourteen-year-old boy is very much into computers (that's hardly surprising). This summer he'll be back with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth program studying - I don't really know exactly what. It's some kind of computer program, I just sign the check.
He's very much both anti-Microsoft and anti-Bill Gates. He's also quite pro-Linux, the emblem of the "Open Source" movement whose adherents regard its underlying virtues with a devotion normally reserved by the religious for the icons of their faiths.
So he wanted me to see "Revolution OS," a documentary about the Linux operating system and the open source movement that spawned the increasingly important competitor to both Microsoft and Apple.
This is a very interesting documentary which I, clueless as to the secrets of operating systems, readily understood. I watched it with the barest comprehension of Linux or the philosophy underlying the open source concept.
Much credit to the filmmaker for not only explaining the seminal value of open source - the commitment to free interchange of ideas with minimal incorporation of legal protection for intellectual property - but for also succinctly allowing contrasting values and competing personalities screen time. This documentary is a very concise but excellent guide for the uninitiated into a world usually the arcane preserve of specialists most adept at talking to each other.
The Open Source movement is a work in progress threatened by the real risk of those benefiting from openness legally protecting their own "added value" and thus, in a sense, betraying their benefactors. Several of those interviewed pursue their open source values almost as a creed, the commitment to computers taking the place of more traditional dogma.
Anyone interested in a major intellectual counterpoint to the dominance of both Microsoft and the role of law in insuring proprietary benefits for innovators should see "Revolution OS": no manual required.
8/10.
