Is "Antitrust" for real?
There's been a lot of buzz on the Net recently about a movie that opened across the country January 12. The villain in MGM's "Antitrust" is based on the man so many love to hate, Bill Gates. Adding to the buzz -- at least among the open source crowd -- is the fact that Linus Torvalds, Jon "maddog" Hall, and Miguel de Icaza were all involved in the making of the movie.
That buzz was more than enough to whet my interest. So when I saw a message on the local LUG mailing list noting that free tickets for a sneak preview could be had at an Austin novelty and graphics company, I immediately drove into town to score one. Each pass was good for two people, so I asked my "three dimensional" to accompany me to the showing.
WARNING: I'll try to write about the film in a way that doesn't spoil it for those who are going to see it after reading this column. But some of my observations or revelations may unintentionally detract from your viewing pleasure. If you're concerned about that, bookmark this page and come back to it after seeing the film. If, on the other hand, you want to know more, visit the movie's Website (see Resources for a link), but be aware that it is not a Linux-friendly site and you may not be able to see all of it.
At the movies
The freebie ticket advised that we should arrive at least half an hour before the show started to be sure of getting a seat. We showed up an hour early and found about a hundred people already waiting in line. From brief conversations, I got the feeling that many of them were simply moviegoers, not geeks. They didn't know, for example, that the evil character of Gary Winston was a caricature of Bill Gates. But we weren't the only geeks there; we joined a group from the LUG sitting dead center and about five rows from the front.
The basic story line is the battle between good and evil. Gary Winston's company (NURV, Never Underestimate Radical Vision) is in a "winner take all" race to achieve global convergence for the delivery of video, sound, and text over all kinds of electronic devices. The product NURV is developing to achieve that convergence is called Synapse, which seems to be some weird science held together by Java.
The forces of evil -- Winston and NURV -- clearly reflect the core values of Bill Gates and Microsoft, as the film contains, for example, numerous references to the government's antitrust case against Microsoft. Winston is shown before a Senate committee mouthing the same sort of absurd
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