Realism of this movie

Eh, you may be right about these points, but you have the give Antitrust major props for actually portraying computers somewhat accurately. I really can't stand movies where a computer flashes a huge colorful box flashing "Enter Password" or something to that effect (movies like Swordfish, Hackers, or Mission Impossible come to mind).

In this movie, computer screens look like computer screens, often displaying normal stuff in MacOS. Also, this movie doesn't assume the audience is computer-retarded and doesn't overexplain excruciatingly basic computer jargon.

So, my hat's off to the makers of Antitrust for doing the computer-movie genre properly.

I liked the movie, but I must say that I agree. This movie tries to be realistic, but tends to push it a little. I really hated all the geek-talk. Like in the beginning when Milo and Teddy are at school working and they write some code and say: "We are geeks." But then again, I kind of understand why they do it like that. It's something they need to point out to the rest of the audience. Seems like it's another computermovie made for a mainstream audience. However it is more realistic than a lot of other computer movies like The Net(which is laughable).

I think this was the only "computer" movie, ever, where I didn't laugh my butt off from the first 5 minutes. A lot of things were pretty good.

To the person who commented that the age mix of employees was unrealistic. Well, I live and work in Silicon Valley and I have worked in companies like that. For some reason, those companies never made it. Go Figure.

In reality, successful companies need a mix of ages and life experiences to be successful. No matter how smart or "genius" someone may be, experience and skills tend to trump those qualities eventually. Plus not everyone in the company can be a superstar. Some people have to do the grunt work and unfun work. Making money and having a successful company is not all tickles and giggles. Not all puzzle tables, humongous offices and high end office furniture and decorations.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

That scene where Robbins catching Phillippe on the computer during the party rung false to me as well. It didn't make sense for him at that point to be mentioning the girl. She had nothing to do with what was going on at the moment and it didn't really make sense.

Lot's of realistic stuff here, lots of not so realistic stuff. I've also worked in high tech, including at Microsoft.

Realistic:
* The campus environment, being part of something bigger than yourself, helping change the world and make it a better place (in the positive sense, which is the way the film started)
* Gary's speech to the troups sounds a lot like stuff Job's did for the Mac; he created a cult around that project
* The age of the team--that happened a lot early in the PC world. It was the case in many groups at Microsoft in the late 80's early 90's. Now it isn't.
* Real code, correct use of technical terms for the most part.

Goofs / unrealistic
* Most of the code was C, but they compiled it as Java; other stuff like that
* The code had nothing to do with telecom, networking or compression. Boring stuff really.
* Treating a college grad as a critical hire. There are certainly great kids that tech companies want to hire out of college, but it is for their potential, not their current skills. New grads aren't contributing like Phillipe was. People are hired that can do those things, but they have a lot more experience and are not nearly as green in being courted.
* Looking at a few lines of code and saying "yeah that's great". What really happens is that people look at innovative algorithms, which end up getting coded
* That you could take a snippet of code from some kid in a garage and apply it to a project like that
* Accessing and controlling satellites via IP on a public network
* That giving out the synapse code would be a big competitive advantage; it is the combination of the hardware, global network, service center and software that makes it valuable, not just the software. Without the other things it isn't nearly as interesting. That made the whole open source angle pretty stupid. The people were great and the code was innovative, but not useful alone.

The tech was good enough for a movie of this sort. What spoiled it for me was the last item. Of course the whole evil genius thing was dumb too, but the movie created real tension and I liked that.

The realism of the movie is indeed questionable.

I've worked as a software dev for about 10 years now but I've never experienced or heard of any CEO get in touch with their hotshot programmers in such a personal way.

I also find it remarkable that a guy like the NURV boss is supposed to still have so much technical background on what's actually going on in development that he can recommend the use of certain source code fragments to his programmers. That's unrealistic.
Most CEO's, even if they once started out in development, have lost contact to recent technology by the time their companies have grown into worldwide operating corporations.

What's also cheesy is that once the guy gets shown some new pirated code from his boss, he instantaneously marvels at it, immediately seeing its "beauty".
Cmon. Most complex software needs quite a while of analysis in order to find out if it is really suited for a certain requirement and if it is really well written in terms of performance and bug-freeness. Just casting a quick glance at it and then judging is just unrealistic, even for a hotshot person.

Corporations working with dirty tricks is rightfully accused in this movie. Go figure.

But other than that, software is a business like any other. Making money from software and protecting valuable in-house innovation by disclosing the source code is perfectly ok with me. It pays my bills, after all.

The emphasis on Open Source and the protagonists being portayed as some kind of software Robin Hoods is just sickening. This guy Teddy (ugh!) was extremely annoying in that regard. I was glad he disappeared soon in the movie (although I'd certainly wished it had not been by getting killed).