When I started making Revolution OS in July of 1999, Silicon Valley was still getting drunk on the giddy Gold Rush atmosphere of the day. That environment definitely had an impact on the type of documentary I was going to make: one that would chronicle the breathtaking IPO of a start-up company.

At the same time, another more fascinating story became the dominant focus of the film. That was the story of Richard Stallman of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, and how his vision of free software led to Linus Torvalds and the Linux operating system. From there the movie morphed into the tale of the grassroots open-source revolution that continually, through no grand design, kept battling one of the most powerful corporations on Earth: Microsoft. Thus, I had the classic underdog story.

For six months I tried to involve Microsoft in the documentary. However, all I got was the runaround from Microsoft's PR firm, Waggener Edstrom. At times they would send me cute but evasive emails. Ultimately, Microsoft's lack of involvement was fine with me because the film was always going to be about GNU, Linux, free software, and the open-source movement.

To have included an occasional clip of some random Microsoft spokesperson would have only given the film the same disingenuous veneer of faux journalistic objectivity that is the silly hallmark of network TV news. More to the point, an anonymous Microsoft spokesperson would have lacked the first-person perspective that was needed. "Revolution OS" is about the people who participated in the history they are discussing. It is not a film of talking heads reading pre-approved talking points.

All the people who appear in "Revolution OS" are speaking of their own personal stories. Those stories together build the mosaic that comprises the story of the rise of the open-source movement. In that spirit, I still wanted to give Bill Gates a chance to speak for himself. So after some detective work in the Stanford University archives, I tracked down an original copy of Bill Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists."

It was in that 1976 letter that Gates articulated his view of the proprietary model of software development and distribution. (The letter is also quite entertaining when read aloud.) Thus, Bill Gates and Microsoft positioned themselves as the natural antagonist in my dramatic story
despite refusing a role in the film. The great irony of all this is that Bill Gates' own photo image company, Corbis, supplied all the eye-catching photos of him and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used in the documentary.

J.T.S. Moore has a bachelor's in history from Stanford and an master's in film production from the USC School of Cinema, and has worked as a screenwriter for Walt Disney. "Revolution OS" is his first documentary.