“In the half-year or so since he published DeCSS on his
website, [Jon] Johansen has become the closest thing the Linux and
hacking communities have to a teen idol. Protesters outside
the courthouse this week waved huge, almost eerie, placards with
his face on them while chanting open-source software slogans at
passersby.”
“The lad was never imprisoned, but the idea of a programmer
being interrogated — and having his computers seized — for what
amounts to a clever hack seemed to symbolize, to many in the
community, corporate arrogance gone too far. At LinuxWorld
2000, Johansen fans passed out bumper stickers that read “Free Jon
Johansen.”
“Earlier in the day, the motion picture industry tried to depict
Johansen as a foe of the open-source Linux operating system. The
move was designed to show that if Linux users truly wanted to play
DVDs on their systems, DeCSS would not have been a Windows
utility.”