Linux is more than just an alternative operating system.

It's also a culture with its own ethics, gods, myths and heroes. A new film, Revolution O.S., explores the human side of the open source and free software movements, telling the inside story of the hackers and programmers rebelling against the corporate machine. Revolution O.S. also depicts the culture of the open source movement by documenting the Installfest parties where people can bring their computers to get free, expert Linux tech support, and the Refund Day protest marches, where Linux users demand reimbursement of the extra fees that get tacked onto the purchase price of new computers for pre-installed Microsoft applications. Revolution O.S. was made by J.T.S. Moore, who was totally unfamiliar with the open source community when he started the project. "It wasn't my idea," Moore said. "One day in June 1999, I was talking on the phone to a good friend from Stanford, Doug Bone. He had seen my various films and videos over the years, and out of the blue, he jokingly suggested I make a documentary about the history of Linux." Moore looked into it and decided there was a great tale to be told about the people behind the software, a story rich with colorful personalities, creation and conflicts. In an attempt to reflect the complicated culture he captured in his project, Moore bills Revolution O.S. as an "epic movie," and said that his one regret was that he didn't have enough money to hire Charlton Heston to narrate the film. Not that the movie needs Heston to establish itself as a bona fide epic, said Moore, because at its core, "the open source movement is about hundreds of thousands of hackers and programmers around the world trying to throw off the yoke of the most powerful corporation on Earth." The 90-minute film begins with Richard Stallman's quest to create a free operating system. It then follows the movement through its two decades-long evolution in interviews with Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond (author of The Cathedral and The Bazaar), Bruce Perens, (author of the Open Source Definition), Brian Behlendorf (leader of the Apache Web server project), Michael Tiemann (founder of the first open source company) and Larry Augustin (founder of VA Linux Systems).