Executive summary, Digital Tipping Point

I am an attorney in San Francisco who is currently producing a documentary film directed by award-wining documentarian Paul Donahue on the use of open source software. The title of the film will be The Digital Tipping Point. The film will basically document the huge global shift toward open source.

At this point, we have about 110 hours of footage, and have interviewed the following people: Christian Ude, Mayor of Munich; Miguel de Vasquez, the Minister of Education for the Spanish State of Extremadura; Brian Behlendorf of the Apache project; Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian Project; Stanford Law Prof. Lawrence Lessig, the author of the book, "Future of Ideas"; Tim Witham, the director of the Open Source Development Lab, where Linus Torvalds is a Fellow; Chris Hofmann of the Mozilla project; Oregon State Representatives Phil Barnhart (D) and Jerry Krummel (R); and Scott Robinson, the Portland Schools administrator who refused to allow a Microsoft audit of the Portland Public School district.

We will be filming on location in Brazil; Extremadura Spain; Munich; Schwaebisch Hall; Portland, Oregon; Edinburgh, Scotland, Largo, Florida; and of course the San Francisco Bay Area. Our 110 hours of film puts us about two-thirds of the way through filming. We plan a release date of early 2005.

This film will be a POV (point of view) film. It will not pretend to be "objective" but neither will it take a preachy view. Our general bias is in favor of open source software in general. However, we will also be making the point that open source “plays well” with proprietary software.

We will not make it our business to bash Microsoft or trash talk Microsoft in this film. We will be taking a candid view of the advantages and disadvantages of open standards versus proprietary standards on the Internet. The theoretical foundation for our film is Lessig's work, "The Future of Ideas" and two of Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen's books, “The Innovator's Dilemma” and “The Innovator's Solution.”

Our distribution will be through film festivals; streaming on line; DVD sales; and theatrical distribution.

We aim for the broadest possible audience.

2004-05-07T13:20:04