My fourteen-year-old boy is very much into computers (that's hardly surprising). This summer he'll be back with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth program studying - I don't really know exactly what. It's some kind of computer program, I just sign the check.<br /><br />He's very much both anti-Microsoft and anti-Bill Gates. He's also quite pro-Linux, the emblem of the "Open Source" movement whose adherents regard its underlying virtues with a devotion normally reserved by the religious for the icons of their faiths.<br /><br />So he wanted me to see "Revolution OS," a documentary about the Linux operating system and the open source movement that spawned the increasingly important competitor to both Microsoft and Apple.<br /><br />This is a very interesting documentary which I, clueless as to the secrets of operating systems, readily understood. I watched it with the barest comprehension of Linux or the philosophy underlying the open source concept.<br /><br />Much credit to the filmmaker for not only explaining the seminal value of open source - the commitment to free interchange of ideas with minimal incorporation of legal protection for intellectual property - but for also succinctly allowing contrasting values and competing personalities screen time. This documentary is a very concise but excellent guide for the uninitiated into a world usually the arcane preserve of specialists most adept at talking to each other.<br /><br />The Open Source movement is a work in progress threatened by the real risk of those benefiting from openness legally protecting their own "added value" and thus, in a sense, betraying their benefactors. Several of those interviewed pursue their open source values almost as a creed, the commitment to computers taking the place of more traditional dogma.<br /><br />Anyone interested in a major intellectual counterpoint to the dominance of both Microsoft and the role of law in insuring proprietary benefits for innovators should see "Revolution OS": no manual required.<br /><br />8/10.