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IT IS UNLIKELY that
anyone would mistake J.T.S. Moore for a computer hacker. He speaks in
the measured tones of a buttoned-down historian. A white forelock on his
otherwise dark head of hair lends an august appearance to his young face.
Indeed, Moore, ’92, is a confirmed fuzzy who majored in history.
But the documentary filmmaker has become a quiet champion for a hacker
cause célèbre: the Open Source software movement that thumbed
its nose at the tech establishment and gave birth to the Linux operating
system. Moore’s self-funded film Revolution OS chronicles
the growth of both.
The Open Source movement had its roots in the early 1970s at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where programmers habitually shared the source
code to their software creations. One of those programmers was Richard
Stallman, who later started the Free Software Foundation. He wanted to
create a copyright-free competitor to UNIX, the granddaddy of all operating
systems. Stallman started the GNU Project (its logo is the African wildebeest;
the acronym stands for GNU’s Not UNIX) and wrote the basics of the
new system, then freely offered it to others to build on. A young Finnish
programmer named Linus Torvalds used pieces of GNU to develop a system
released in 1991 and later dubbed Linux.
Today, Linux, owned by none and free to all, is used by some 20 million
people eager for a non-Microsoft operating system. Linux users continually
“hack” improvements to the system, not for money but for the
prestige of doing so. In this context, hackers are not miscreants bent
on crashing websites, but high-minded programmers out to make a better
world through better code. Linux’s wide adoption continues to threaten
not only the dominance of Microsoft’s closed-source Windows operating
systems, but also the notion that software should always be proprietary
and copyrighted.
Moore first hit upon the idea of filming a documentary about the Linux
movement in the summer of 1999. Several former Stanford classmates were
working at Linux-related companies at the time. Doug Bone, MS ’88,
suggested the field was ripe for documentary treatment. Moore, who had
completed his master’s in film production at USC, was intrigued.
“I was a fuzzy all the way,” Moore says. “I have no background
in it [information technology]—my focus was on the historical and
political side of this story.”
At the time, he was living in Los Angeles and working as a screenwriter
for Disney. He put that career on hold and decided to fund the project
himself. Moore had been saving for eight years to make an independent
film, but realized it would be far cheaper to do a documentary: “No
actors!” He won’t disclose how much he spent, saying only that
by being frugal—he used leftover 35-mm film scraps bought at steep
discounts—it cost him a fraction of a studio’s typical expenditure.
He did everything himself, except the sound mix and music.
Moore discovered his subject’s political fault lines by stepping
on them. He turned up at the Linux World conference in San Jose, Calif.,
in August 1999 with a camera on his shoulder but little background on
the players he hoped to film.
First there was Torvalds. The free operating system founder was so besieged
by crowds, Moore couldn’t get near him. As for Stallman, Moore made
the mistake of introducing himself this way: “Hi, I’m making
a film about the Linux operating system and. . . . ”
Stallman cut him short. No one had forewarned Moore that the GNU creator
was on a crusade to change the Linux moniker to GNU/Linux, to reflect
his own contribution. “They threw me to the wolves,” he jokes.
It took Moore two months to recover from that gaffe, but he finally persuaded
Stallman to appear in the film. Torvalds also came on board, interviewed
in the Santa Clara duplex he used to live in. Others in the documentary
include Eric Raymond, author of the groundbreaking essay “The Cathedral
and the Bazaar,” which helped inspire Netscape to release its browser’s
source code to the public.
Larry Augustin takes Moore’s camera on a tour of the Stanford campus
and describes how, as a PhD candidate in electrical engineering, he came
to see a market opportunity for a Linux-related company. Augustin, MS
’85, PhD ’94, and James Vera, MS ’89, PhD ’01, founded
VA Linux Systems, customizing computer equipment to run the new operating
system. The start-up went on to rise 766 percent above the offering price
of $30 on its first day of trading in December 1999, a record ascent chronicled
in Revolution OS.
One of the film’s chief pleasures is the
chance to meet“in person” the various oddball programming gurus
who gained a disembodied fame on the web. “They’re all very
quirky,” Moore allows.
From underneath a caveman’s beard and long hair, the eyes of Richard
Stallman dance and sparkle as he conjures a world without software copyrights.
Torvalds, a measured counterpoint to the gesticulating Stallman, speaks
as softly as a librarian, but always with a barely suppressed laugh. Half
provocateur and half conciliator, Torvalds says, “Think of Richard
Stallman as the great philosopher and think of me as the engineer.”
Or, as Moore puts it, “Richard is much more of a classic revolutionary.
Linus has put an appealing face on the movement.”
Bucking the aesthetics of the very industry he was documenting, Moore
shot with 35-mm film in part because it doesn’t degrade as quickly
as video. He aimed to create an enduring historical document. He also
used the wide-screen cinemascope process. The effect is oddly captivating,
seeing the bland corners of Silicon Valley in epic relief. “If this
movement has the long-term ramifications everyone says it will, I want
to record it on the best quality media,” Moore says.
He also gave each subject plenty of uninterrupted time to clearly explain
the political, economic and technological developments in freeware. “We
use a technique called copyleft,” Stallman tells the camera. “The
idea of copyleft is that it’s copyright flipped over. What we do
is say, ‘This software is copyrighted, and we, the authors, give
you permission to redistribute copies. We give you permission to change
it. We give you permission to add to it.’” The only condition
is that the altered version must also be passed along under the same conditions
to the next user. “Everywhere the software goes, the freedom goes,
too,” Stallman explains. In that way, Stallman’s GNU made it
to Torvalds and a revolution began.
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| OPENING DOORS: Linux creator Linus Torvalds. |
| Mark Estes |
Before Moore fully appreciated the tensions between
the Philosopher and the Engineer, he caught a rich moment on film at Linux
World in 1999 when Torvalds presented Stallman with the Linus Torvalds
Award for Open Source Computing. The award, Stallman tells the convention
audience, “is kind of like giving the Han Solo award to the rebel
fleet . . . I ask people, please tell people this is the GNU system.”
All the while Torvalds happily upstages Stallman by letting his two toddlers
gambol near the podium.
It’s a funny moment and fortuitous that Moore captured it. Torvalds
wins the day. But Moore, who admits to having great sympathy for Stallman,
ends the film with a musical tribute to the GNU founder played by a group
of comically expressionless geek musicians. “Join us now and share
the software. You’ll be free,” a singer croons, as a couple
of guys in button-down shirts stiffly play bongos.
Revolution OS was shown at festivals and industry screenings around
the country last year; the Sundance channel plans to air it this year.
But marketing it became a challenge, given its happy ending—the triumphant
vA Linux Systems ipo. By last fall the company had formally abandoned
its Linux-based business, seeking the new name va Software. Recently,
Moore added a postscript to the film to update viewers.
“Star Wars is the myth for these people,” Moore says.
“What’s going on now is the Empire Strikes Back phase.
The Linux companies have taken a tremendous beating. Three years from
now, who knows?”
Whether the Jedi return or not, Moore plans more cinematic ventures, perhaps
with documentaries on UNIX or Sun Microsystems. “It’s a natural
extension of what I’ve done.”
Ann Marsh, ’88, is a writer in Los
Angeles.
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