Linux begins in 1991 as a hobby project posted to a newsgroup by a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds, and this film traces the decade that followed, when that hobby turned into a global collaboration that challenged the commercial software industry. Interviews with Torvalds and the developers who joined him early on lay out how the kernel grew through volunteers scattered across continents, coordinating over email and mailing lists rather than in any shared office. The film covers the culture that built around the code: the arguments over licensing, the free software philosophy pushed by Richard Stallman, and the tension between idealism and the commercial interest that eventually arrived once companies realized what an open, freely modifiable operating system could do for them. Rather than treating Linux as a finished success story, the film stays with the uncertainty of the period, when nobody involved knew whether a project run by volunteers could keep pace with proprietary competitors. It is a portrait of a working method as much as a piece of software.