Revolution OS

Film review

Ahh, the good times :-)

This film was made during the dot-com boom, and, per release information on IMDb, first screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2001.

Only in its end titles does the film show the first casualties of the dot.com crash (a second release of the film was in 2002), so this documentary really well reflects the spirit of the times, just as the original series of "Star Trek" was the best science fiction in 1960's.

Despite its shortcomings of appearing propaganda-like (see some of the more balanced IMDb reviews) and not the most stellar music editing, I still kinda like the documentary, as it was filmed during a time when life seemed really nice: The dot com crash had yet to happen, and 9/11 hadn't happened yet... And so the times were quite a bit more hopeful than in the years that followed.

Alas, many of the companies mentioned aren't there anymore: VA Linux, Cygnus, Netscape, and many-many others. Not long after, Corel stopped making Linux. Sun Microsystems was purchased by Oracle. Red Hat is still here, but it's not exactly in the desktop business. Netscape itself was purchased by AOL, and subsumed into it, and then not much is left of it. Netscape's move to open-source its Communicator suite (which included the Navigator browser) was indeed pivotal, as it laid the ground for Mozilla and eventually Firefox.

Nobody at the time saw the emergence of Google. Or that the principles of this freedom would lead to Lawrence Lessing to found the Creative Commons movement, which gave additional impetus to found Wikipedia. Incredible.

I somehow failed to notice at the time how even the modern men's haircuts and hair styles were different back then, short of being less astute. I guess since these styles were ubiquitous, then nobody really noticed S:)