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Open Source Hits Below the Belt Open Source advocates may like to pretend they're on the side of the angels, but they're fighting dirtier than any of their opponents.

If you haven't seen AntiTrust yet, intend to, and don't like spoilers, go read something else; I'm not going to get heavily into the plot, but one of the things I want to discuss is a big (albeit obvious) plot point.

Keri and I went to go see the movie AntiTrust on Friday night. It was, in many ways, a fairly fun Geek movie; the credits and titles were (occaisionally amusingly wrong) HTML tags. Some of the catchphrases and actions of the actors were amusing, at least to geeks. The plot was OK, I suppose, and the technology was... well... not as bad as most movies make it. I mean, I wish I had a CD-RW drive that could write a full disk in 30 seconds, but at least they showed the actors using actual drives. The screenshots were Linux, running the Gnome desktop, and were recognizable as such. And that's part of the problem.

See, this movie was made by Open Source advocates. John "maddog" Hall and Miguel de Icaza are both listed as contributors to the film. The movie did an OK job of summarizing the Open Source ideal, although their explanation was a little too zealous and too little factual. To make matters worse, they personally attacked Bill Gates - a lot. They could have done all the Open Source advocacy in this movie without a single attack on anyone, but apparently the childish side of the people behind the movie couldn't be suppressed.

Tim Robbins plays Gary Winston, "the bad guy", a monopolistic, closed-source CEO of a big monolithic software company. As we discover in the course of the movie, he doesn't like Open Source softare, doesn't respect the requirements of open source licenses, and has even killed Open Source developers who get in his way. (Strangely, closed-source competitors don't seem to be targeted, either for violence or espionage.) Now, this is an acceptable basis for the movie. I might disagree with some of the things they seem to be implying, intentionally or unintentionally - like "closed source can only be successful by stealing from Open Source developers" - but I'd have had no problems with the movie if that's all they'd done. But they didn't stop there.

• Gary Winston's company, N.U.R.V., is located in the Pacific Northwest. (Portland, though. Not Seattle.)
• N.U.R.V. is being investigated by the Justice Department for monopolistic and anti-trust violations.
• Gary Winston's home has many of the features Bill Gates' house is rumored to have, such as digital canvas.
• Gary Winston is a slightly geeky guy who wears black eyeglasses. He looks... familiar. Not quite a twin to Bill Gates, but maybe a cousin.
• Several of Winston's speeches remind me of speeches I've heard Gates give. (I can't say they're identical, but the themes are familiar.)
• The N.U.R.V. campus could have been shot on Microsoft's Redmond campus. The architecture is similar, the landscaping is the same style, even the company cafeteria strongly reminded both Keri and I of the cafeteria we were in while I interviewed there.
• Gary Winston's wife is a tall blonde, who looks generally like Melinda Gates (though the resemblance is less than Gary Winston's resemblance to Bill) and, coincidently, is named either "Melinda" or "Belinda". (It's only mentioned once.)
• The music in the background at a party Gary Winston throws is that same annoying "we could be heroes" song Microsoft uses for all their commercials.

In general, both Keri and I immediately identified "Gary Winston" as Bill Gates. He looks like him, sounds like him, acts like him (generally, I mean, not the theft and murder) and his company looks and sounds exactly like Microsoft. We weren't the only ones in the theater to reach the same conclusion, either; everyone around seemed very certain it was Bill Gates. I can't believe it's not intentional, either; there are too many deliberate "coincidences". Why is the company in Portland? The cliche would be Silicon Valley. The antitrust thing - OK, it ties in with the movie. Why does Gary have such a strong personal resemblance to Bill Gates? Tim Robbins doesn't really look like him, so it had to be deliberately done. Why is his wife's name so similar to that of Bill Gates' wife, and why does she look similar? All a coincidence? Yes, right. Considering the topic of the movie, unless they intended to target Bill Gates, they should have taken every effort to make Gary Winston an overweight, bald, black man - or better yet, a woman - who moved to Southern California after a life in the Deep South. But they didn't. So the only reasonable assumption is that it was deliberate. Why?

Hmm... to make Bill Gates appear to be a murdering thief?

To make the statement that Bill Gates personally is evil?

The Linux zealots love to point fingers at Microsoft, screaming about their use of distorted statistics and figures to lie about Windows' performance versus Linux. The rant about the pressure Microsoft puts on its competitors. They are the forces of good, they say, championing the cause of the Common Man in the fight against the Big Evil Corporation. And the first chance they get to advocate their philosophy and their system to the general public - a big-picture movie about Open Source - they spend it all in personal attacks against one man. Someone you may not agree with - I don't, particularly - but not a man who has committed murder for his own ends. There's not a single shred of evidence that he or Microsoft have ever stolen code from Open Source developers.

Now, they might argue that they only intended to make Closed Source programming appear evil, that it's the corporations and the business model they were attacking. OK... then why orient the movie so that everything is directly attributed to this Bill Gates character, and again, why make him Bill Gates at all?

If I wanted the mudslinging, I'd have watched presidential politics. Instead, I had to watch as once again the Open Source community is represented by the same brainless adolescent nitwits that made Slashdot unbearable to read anymore.