Movies - Revolution OS

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	Movies - Revolution OS

Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, Free Software and the Open Source movement. It features several interviews with prominent people, including Richard Stallman, Michael Tiemann, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Frank Hecker and Brian Behlendorf. It was directed by J.T.S. Moore.

The film shows the evolution of Linux, starting with the beginning software development, from the time where software was shared on paper tape for the price of doing the copy, to where Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists where he asked Computer Hobbyists to not share, but buy software, and finally reaching Richard Stallman, explaining why he left the MIT Lab for Artificial Intelligence and to devote his further life to the development of free software and how he started with the GNU project.

Michael Tiemann (he was interviewed in a desert) tells how he met Stallman and got an early version of Stallman's GCC, which he started to work on.

Larry Augustin tells on the campus where it happened, how he got the resulting GNU Software and a usual Personal Computer and combined it to a very powerful UNIX-Workstation which was costing one third the price workstation by Sun Microsystems, but were three times as powerful. He continues to the funding of VA Linux until their IPO.

Brian Behlendorf, one of the original developers of the Apache HTTP Server, explains how he started to exchange patches for the Web-Server NCSA httpd with other developers and how this led to the release of a-"patchy" webserver, Apache.

Frank Hecker of Netscape tells how it came that Netscape executives released the source code for Netscape's browser, one of the signals which made Open Source recognized by Business Executives and mainstream media.

The film also contains footage from huge crowds and large show floor at the first very large LinuxWorld Summit, with appearances of Linus Torvalds and Larry Augustin on the keynote stage.

Since the takes for the movies have been done in the Silicon Valley, viewers might believe that Linux has been developed there only, interviews at other places are missing, but even without them, the work documents the most important events in the evolution of Linux.

The film appeared in several film festivals including South By Southwest Film Festival, the Atlanta Film & Video Festival, Boston Film Festival, and Denver International Film Festival; it won Best Documentary at both the Savannah Film & Video Festival and the Kudzu Film Festival.

The second DVD of the two-disc special edition, created by ThinkGeek, contains uncut versions of the interviews.

A write-in campaign to Wonderview Productions, copyright holders of Revolution OS, to get them to donate the uncut interviews to Archive.org is underway.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Revolution OS ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Revolution OS; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

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