Paraphrasing Apple and their famous advertising campaign, we can safely say that Finnish movie director Hannu Puttonen (1960–2023) was very interested in the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. He made a living telling their stories: those of fringe characters, edgy culture movements, and radical artistic outsiders. And that is why, in 2001, he directed the first documentary ever made about Linux, because if you think carefully about it, its story can be seen as a savant mixture of those three attributes.
Hannu Puttonen followed his gut instincts, and directed “Mr. Bragg Goes to Moscow” (1988), his first documentary, in which followed British songwriter and left-wing activist Billy Bragg on a concert tour of the Soviet Union during the Perestroika era. Because of course, why not. In the same vein, came later “Bring the Beat Back!” (1992), one of the earliest documentaries to pay attention to the burgeoning techno scene, featuring pioneers like Bill Drummond (from The KLF) and Richard H. Kirk (from Cabaret Voltaire). This documentary was released well before Prodigy, Daft Punk, or Moby made electronica mainstream. Or last but definitely not least, “Momus Man of Letters” (1994), an experimental documentary about the eccentric Scottish musician Nicholas Currie, aka Momus, featuring appearances by Jarvis Cocker of British britpop legend Pulp.
Still reading? If any of the names in the previous paragraph rang any bell in you without having to click to read their Wikipedia entries, it means that you are, just like the author of this article, a proud member of Generation X.
Hannu Puttonen was, then, the perfect filmmaker for the first documentary about Linux, and as explained above, not only because he was Finnish like Linus Torvalds himself. So came to be “The Code” (2001), a very fittingly hour-long documentary that we have decided to feature as this months’ Vidéothèque entry.
By the time Puttonen interviewed Linus, the Kernel (in uppercase, please) was barely a decade old, and yet it was gently starting to stir the pot of technology economics. For the sake of narration, the early story of the Kernel is then split in three major sections: birth, philosophy, and economics.
First and foremost, Linux was born a true hobby project. We all know that by now. But back in 1991, having an operating system developed via the collaboration of developers (or “worker ants”) spread all over the world was unprecedented, radically subversive, and fascinating. Of course, the documentary explains around minute seven that “Linux” the kernel is not the same as “Linux” the operating system.
Then comes the philosophy. As I wrote in a previous article of this magazine,
Everything changed in 1998. That is when Christine Peterson coined the phrase “Open Source,” deliberately masking the business-unfriendly moniker of “Free Software” which Wall Street abhored so much. More or less at the same time, Netscape decided to rewrite its own product. Such wise decision, widely celebrated by the “community” helped Microsoft win the infamous browser wars; this situation ultimately begat Internet Explorer 6 and its horrible crush on web development for the next decade.
Richard Stallman has spent countless hours for the past 30 years explaining people that Free Software ≠ Open Source, but few people are paying attention. This, also, is explained in the documentary.
Microsoft took notice and decided to attack the whole concept. Hence the final part of “The Code”, telling us about the economics and dynamics of the Linux Kernel project. From Torvalds’ “Benevolent Dictator” status, to the “dot com boom” of the late 1990s, and even showing an interview of Bob Young, one of the founders of Red Hat around minute 38. It all ends with a nice bow, predicting the impact of Linux in emerging markets and its impact in software intellectual property, a never ending issue, around minute 48.
Oh, and our preferred quote, from legendary Kernel maintainer Alan Cox around minute 24:
To me code has more in common with for example poetry or some kinds of writing. The beauty of it is in the structure, in putting ideas across one at a time in a clear way. So a good piece of code you read without comments and it’s immediately obvious why it’s been written, how it’s elegant. So you’re looking for code which is both clean and elegant. But also doesn’t rely on clever programming tricks, doesn’t make assumptions which may not be true in the future. Because the last thing we want to do is having much code in the Linux kernel which requires large amounts of effort to keep it working. We want code which will just continue to work, and work forever.
This film having been released in 2001, no mentions can should be found therein about “The Cloud”, Android, containers, Kubernetes, NASA’s Ingenuity, Valve’s Steam Deck, cars, or other interesting things people have built upon Linux during the first quarter of the 21st century. On the other hand, TiVo was around at the time of the release of this film, it was already using Linux, and not without controversy.
Internet wisdom usually advocates for not reading comments, but I feel the need to reproduce one from YouTube user Peter Trinh, which faithfully conveyed the spirit of the documentary, resonating ideas around a “decentralized economic systems based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation” we talked about in a previous article:
I just saw this documentary. I really enjoyed it. I loved the passion and beliefs of people that showed through. This is the kind of stuff that enamored me to computers and Linux in the first place. A sort of innocence, curiousity, and a deep desire to do something good, and doing the work for a vague something-something that is larger than us. So much that we would be willing to do this lovingly as a hobby. I really miss the days like this when we could share this together, even across distances and mindsets.
There is nothing preventing us from bringing those days and those feelings back into fashion, other than our own will, that is.
Watch this month’s Vidéothèque entry, “The Code” (2001), by Hannu Puttonen, on YouTube.
(Oh, and if you are fluent in Finnish and cannot get enough computer history in your system, we can recommend watching the launch of Linux 1.0 on March 30th, 1994, by Linus Torvalds himself. You are most welcome.)
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.