I am a civil attorney in San Francisco, California, and I'm just wild about free open source software and open standards. How I came to be interested in FOSS is interesting. During the 2000 US election cycle, I struck up a friendship with a sys admin worked for a different law firm in the same building my practice occupies. During lunch time conversations, I expressed concern for the increasing raft of viruses that I was hearing about in the media.

The sys admin told me that Linux doesn't get viruses to speak of. I wanted to know more. Would I be able to use WordPerfect? If not, was there an equivalent to reveal codes in whatever office suite ran on Linux? Would my attorney calendaring programs and mandatory Judicial Council forms run on Linux?

Despite hearing that I wouldn't be able to bring all of my Win programs with me into the Linux world, I decided to try Linux based on the fact that viruses were not an issue; that there were no licensing hassles; and that the sys admin was kind enough to build a box for me out of parts that I had purchased on the Internet.

Of course, there were some migration issues back in late 2000, early 2001 that are no longer a problem. So my migration was indeed a bit painful, but the more I became involved in Linux, the more clearly I saw the benefits of software that was free as in free speech. Then I hear about Palladium, and I was concerned that maybe Microsoft would succeed in establishing some kin of lock down that would extend from the PC onto the Internet itself. I began giving out CDs on trains, planes and buses, and anywhere else I could find someone who was willing to talk with me about it. That didn't seem to work too well, though, and so I began talking about FLOSS on attorney discussion lists. That generated some interest, but no converts that I knew of. I gave two lectures to attorneys at Mandatory Continuing Legal Education seminars, but again, no nibbles.

Eventually, a friend of mine from college, Paul Donahue, moved back to San Francisco, and we exchanged stories of our recent lives. My girlfriend, Dorothee Weiler, who was hanging out with us, suggested that we should combine Paul's interest in making films with my interest in ranting about software libre. We decided then and there to make a film about open source. I had been chatting with Sam Hiser, then the marketing lead for OOo, about what it would take to reach a tipping point at which the Microsoft desktop monopoly would be broken. Sam and I agreed that Microsoft's business model was based on its desktop monopoly, then breaking that monopoly would result in a sudden, dramatic erosion of Microsoft's market share. A tipping point. That would be the name for our film.

About that time, I was riding on a bus in San Francisco, and I chatted with the woman next to me about my film, the Tipping Point. She asked if I had heard of Malcolm Gladwell's book by the same name. I hadn't heard of it, but I sure ran right out and bought a copy of the book. I then realized that tipping points happened in lots of different industries, and so the name of our film became the Digital Tipping Point.

Shortly thereafter, I was found an opporunity to meet with Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamente at a fundraiser during the infamous California recall. I emailed a couple of my geek friends to see if they wanted to come with me to chat up Cruz about deploying open source in California government. Only Danese Cooper took me up on the offer. We went, we drank wine, we chatted up Cruz, it went nowhere, but on the way home, Danese suggested that I read larry Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas. I read that book, and it changed the entire course of the film. Among other interesting things, Lessig's book mentioned Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovations, and suggested that GNU/Linux was a disruptive technology. Bam! I instantly saw that there was a sound economic theory to support my belief that a digital tipping point would soon be reached in the desktop software industry in the same way that Sony, Honda, and other disruptive vendors up-ended the market leaders in their industries.

By this time, Paul Donahue and I had begun our globe trotting. We were really lucky, and the world basically opened its doors to our cameras. A list of some of the interviewees for our film is here:
http://www.digitaltippingpoint.com/content/view/20/42/1/1/

Since starting the film, I have also become interested in doing other things to help bring the digital tipping point home. I have helped install a thin client network in a local school, and will soon start teaching FLOSS application usage skills there. Along with Adam Doxtater, I have co-founded DIYparts.org a site for the exhange of "open source hardware", meaning old hardware which will run FLOSS just fine. That site is here:
http://www.DIYparts.org

I am also a staff writer for Adam Doxtater at MadPenguin.org.
http://www.madpenguin.org/static/about.html

I saw that Marco mentioned something about FL v. OSS on his bio, so I'll mention it here, too. I believe that, in the long run, our goal should be to encourage people to understand the importance of software libre. I think that there the difference between OSS and FL aspects of FLOSS can best be understood as cultural differences, and should treated with the appropriate sensitivity, as we would in attempting to learn the language of a country to which we are traveling. I have had an article on that point published here in Free Software magazine:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_01/free_software_advantage/

I am really glad to be a member of this group, because it is clear to me that open standards are the next big lever that we to pull in order to break the Microsoft monopoly, thereby gaining a chance of fair competition on the desktop for both proprietary and FLOSS software. I would like to thank Ian Lynch for asking me to join! I hope to provide the group with prompt media access, as was the case with this article on ODF that I submitted to Adam Doxtater the day of the ODF press release:
http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=5291

Thanks again for allowing me to participate in this great group!