Holding Up Hollywood

摘要

These days the big star at Sony Pictures' special-effects shop, Imageworks, isn't Spider-Man or Stuart Little―it's a piece of software called Linux. Twelve years ago a Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds hacked it together and gave it away on the Internet. Since then thousands of programmers around the world have developed it col-laboratively, crafting an operating system that is fast, stable and―best of all―free. So instead of buying pricey specialized computers from the likes of Silicon Graphics, the techies at Imageworks simply load Linux onto hundreds of cheap Intel-based PCs to crank out dazzling effects for movies like Lord of the Rings, Seabiscuit and Spider-Man. Better yet, these low-cost systems are way more powerful than what they replaced.