The Code
The Code
| 26 September 2001 (USA)
The Code Trailers

The Code is a Finnish-made documentary about Linux, featuring some of the most influential people of the free software movement.

Reviews
Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined
Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
Mabel Munoz Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?
Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
Christopher E. Meadows This film, originally made as a documentary for Finnish television, is currently floating around on the giFT peer to peer network--a network which is largely restricted to Linux users, so it is unsurprising that it can be downloaded from over a dozen different people there.Through this film, Linux is traced from its early days as a hobby project of Linus Torvalds's, through its rapid rise in popularity and number of users, to the dot-com boom and bust, and beyond. The differing ideologies of Richard "GNU" Stallman and Eric "Open Source" Raymond are also explored. Anybody who has been following Linux for very long, reading websites like Slashdot and Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay will probably already know most this. However, for those people, the film does offer a chance to see and hear these Linux icons talk--putting faces and voices to people who might otherwise have been just words on a screen.Despite its Finnish origin, most of this documentary is in English--either the naturally-spoken English of most of the Linux personalities, or a heavily-accented voiceover narrator--with Finnish subtitles. Only a few of the interviewees (Linus Torvalds's parents, employees of Chinese Linux corporations) are untranslated (since, after all, the show was originally aimed at Finns).