[SPOILER-WARNING]
While I sit here and wait for my fscking RAID repair to complete, I thought I would scribble out some of my thoughts about the recent Disney movie, Tron: Legacy. A good friend of mine and I went and saw this movie, and I will admit right off the bat that the strong appeal of the movie consisted mostly of the fact that the brilliant Daft Punk produced the film’s soundtrack. Nevertheless, I enjoyed more than the music, and an initial hook grabbed my attention less than twenty minutes into the film; a hook that I’m afraid will go mostly unnoticed to the average moviegoer.
What was this hook? you may ask. The family-centric plot? Nope. The amazing soundtrack? No, again. The really cool visuals? No, although I do admit that I did not see it in 3-D (passive 3-D glasses harm your vision and the effect nauseates me personally anyway). The whimsical idea that an entire society of sentient beings lives in all of our computers? No, so replace the side cover on your PC case. What grabbed me, then? The underlying and powerful notion of user freedom.
You don’t have to spend a long time around me to know that I strongly advocate computer user freedom. I don’t want to make this an exposition of the benefits of free software (if you’re unfamiliar, acquaint yourself: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), but the beginning of the movie was an exciting action sequence showing the protagonist, Sam Flynn, hacking into a server farm and setting an operating system free (releasing the source code to the public), restoring power and freedom to the users. I hope not only I recognized the significance of that scene, but I think I was probably alone.
A monolithic and monopolistic software company, ENCOM, whose sole product is an operating system (OS), inarguably represents Microsoft and their flagship OS, Windows. Even the mention of Windows makes me want to take this note a different direction, but I’ll focus, I promise, on freedom. As I was saying, Sam hacks his way into ENCOM’s servers to obtain and release the source code to their operating system, simultaneously ruining (in a way both humiliating to ENCOM and hilarious to the world) the international launch of their next OS version 12. On a tangential note, one of the old-school, pro-user board members asks during the launch meeting, “What is new about [this new version of our operating system]?” Amongst chuckles and in true Microsoft fashion, the CEO replies “We put a 12 on the box.”
So anyway, back to freedom (focus, Mike): Why was it important for the Sam to release the OS’s source code to the public? He recognized the rights of the user and the freedoms they (should) have. By keeping source code closed the users are denied freedom and rights they should have, particularly in this case the right to know what exactly is different in this new version that makes it worthwhile to upgrade (apparently nothing). Without the source code users would have no practical way to examine the software Microsof–err, ENCOM–peddles. Denying source access also renders impossible a host of other activities, including tinkering: You can’t take the software that you bought and improve it or customize it, and that’s important to a lot of people.
It’s hard to stay on track when really two issues are at play here, both harmful to consumers (users): Non-free software and monopoly. Maybe I can save elaboration on the second for another note if my RAID ever needs fscking again; it’s getting late now.
The sequence in Tron: Legacy when Sam frees the OS code underlines the notion of user freedom, a notion which the movie carries consistently in various forms, including the enslavement of the ISOs, and the movie-long attempt of the protagonists to escape from the computer system. I sure enjoyed the Daft Punk-penned score, but I relished the nod to user freedom, even though I may have been the only one to see it and nod back. Even expecting other people to recognize the link between ENCOM and Microsoft is a long shot, kind of like expecting them to recognize that the Grid is a Unix system (the last scene is without a doubt the most impressive visualization of a sudo rm -rf / that I have ever seen).
I’m glad to say that I think Disney actually made something of some importance here. I’m sad to say that the guy four rows back making handfarts every ten minutes probably didn’t catch it.
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