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Jamie Zawinski

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Jamie Zawinski
Born
James Werner Zawinski

(1968-11-03) November 3, 1968 (age 55)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Websitejwz.org

Jamie Werner Zawinski (born November 3, 1968), commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco.

Biography[edit]

Zawinski's programming career began at age 16 with Scott Fahlman's Spice Lisp project at Carnegie Mellon University. He then worked at AI startup Expert Technologies, Inc. followed by Robert Wilensky and Peter Norvig's AI research group at UC Berkeley, working on natural language processing.

In 1990, he joined Lucid Inc., first working on Lucid Common Lisp, and then on Lucid's Energize C++ IDE. Lucid used GNU Emacs as the text editor for its IDE due to its free license, popularity, and extensibility, and Zawinski led that project. As Zawinski and the other programmers made fundamental changes to GNU Emacs to add new functionality, tensions over how to merge these patches into the main tree eventually led to the fork of the project into Lucid Emacs, renamed XEmacs.[1]

In 1992, he released the first version of XScreenSaver, a free and open-source collection containing more than 240[2] screensavers. It was launched for Unix, and gained support for macOS, iOS, and Android. On Unix, it also provides the framework for blanking and locking the screen.[3]

Netscape and Mozilla[edit]

Following Lucid's bankruptcy in 1994, Zawinski became one of the initial employees of Mosaic Communications, renamed Netscape. He developed the Unix release of Netscape Navigator 1.0,[4][5] and later, Netscape Mail, the first mail reader (or Usenet reader) to natively support HTML.[6]

Zawinski devised the name "Mozilla" (originally the internal code-name of the web browser) during a staff meeting, as a portmanteau of Godzilla and "Mosaic killer".[7][8]

An easter egg he coded in the Netscape browser became quite well known during the early days of the World Wide Web: typing "about:jwz" into the address box leads to his home page, and changes the browser's logo animation to a fire-breathing dragon.[9]

Through his long-time support and advocacy for free software inside and outside the company, Zawinski is credited with having inspired Netscape's decision to open-source the browser in 1998.[10][11] He was a founder of Mozilla.org, registering its domain name on the day of Netscape's open source announcement and helping design and run the organization through its first year.[12][13][14]

When Netscape was acquired by AOL in 1999, he wrote a bulletin explaining that Mozilla's work would continue with or without Netscape.[15] One year after the initial source code release, he resigned from Netscape and Mozilla, citing his disappointment that others involved in the project had decided to rewrite the code instead of incrementally improving it.[16][17]

DNA Lounge[edit]

Shortly after leaving Mozilla, he announced his purchase of DNA Lounge, a nightclub in San Francisco.[18][19][20][21] Zawinski purchased the nightclub in 1999 for approximately US$5 million and it was re-opened in July 2001, a process which he documented extensively in his DNA Sequencing weblog.[22][23]

In 2016, he explored alternative funding ideas to save the venue during a downturn in attendance.[22]

In media[edit]

In 2000, Zawinski starred in the 60-minute-long PBS documentary Code Rush, which chronicles the creation of Mozilla.org and the release of the browser source code during 1998.

Zawinski features extensively in Josh Quittner's 1998 book Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft,[24] and in Glyn Moody's 2001 book, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution.[11] There is a chapter on Zawinski in Peter Seibel's 2009 book, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming.[25][26] In 2001, he was featured in California Dreamin': The Gold Rush, a documentary for German public television.[27] [28]

Zawinski appears in several video installations at the Computer History Museum's exhibit, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.[29]

He was featured in Sleep Mode: The Art of the Screensaver,[30] a gallery exhibition curated by Rafaël Rozendaal at Rotterdam's Het Nieuwe Instituut in 2017.

Zawinski's Law[edit]

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, states:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features:[31][32]

Zawinski has stated:[33]

My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.

Principles[edit]

Zawinski first attained prominence as a Lisp programmer, but most of his larger projects are written in C. He has long been critical of languages lacking memory safety and automatic memory management. He has particularly proselytized against C++. In Peter Seibel's book Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming, Zawinski calls C++ an "abomination... the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's an object system".[26][34]

He has written and published many utilities in Perl,[35] and characterizes Perl as "combining all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript."[36]

He has criticized several language and library deficiencies in Java, specifically the overhead of certain fundamental classes but especially the marketing and politics behind it that led Sun to conflate the language, the class library, the virtual machine, and the security model all under the same name, "Java" – to, he says, the detriment of them all. Ultimately, he returned to C because, as he had said by the year 2000, "it's still the only way to ship portable programs".[37]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (February 11, 2000). "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism". Retrieved May 1, 2023.
  2. ^ "List of screen savers included in the collection". XScreenSaver. December 8, 2020. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  3. ^ "Release history". XScreenSaver. December 8, 2020. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  4. ^ "Netscape Navigator's "about:authors" page". December 15, 1994. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  5. ^ Steinert-Threlkeld, Tom (October 31, 1995). "Can You Work in Netscape Time?". Fast Company magazine.
  6. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (November 20, 2017). "HTML email, was that your fault?". jwz.org blog. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  7. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (1996). "The Netscape Dorm". jwz.org. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  8. ^ Dave Titus with assistance from Andrew Wong (December 1, 2002). "How was Mozilla born: The story of the first mascot on the Internet". Retrieved May 1, 2023.
  9. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (December 3, 2011). "The secret history of the about:jwz URL". jwz.org. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  10. ^ Suárez-Potts, Louis (May 1, 2001). "Interview: Frank Hecker". OpenOffice. Archived from the original on August 7, 2001. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  11. ^ a b Moody, Glyn (February 18, 2001). Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-7867-4520-3.
  12. ^ Jim Hamerly and Tom Paquin with Susan Walton (January 3, 1999). "Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla". Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 978-0-596-55390-6.
  13. ^ Boutin, Paul (July 1998). "Electric Word: Mozilla.organizer". Wired. Vol. 6, no. 7.
  14. ^ Quittner, Josh (March 23, 1998). "Netscape's Hail Mary". Archived from the original on February 23, 2002.
  15. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (November 23, 1998). "Fear and loathing on the merger trail". Mozilla. Retrieved April 29, 2013.
  16. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (March 31, 1999). "Resignation and postmortem". Archived from the original on August 7, 2004. Retrieved March 29, 2013.
  17. ^ Festa, Paul (April 1, 1999). "AOL, Mozilla lose key evangelist". CNET. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  18. ^ Knauss, Greg (November 7, 2000). "Hacking the City". Stating the Obvious. Archived from the original on May 14, 2021. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  19. ^ Leonard, Andrew (February 10, 2000). "Free the night life!". Salon. Retrieved April 29, 2013.
  20. ^ Thomas, Evany (July 16, 2001). "From Netscape to Nightclub". Wired. Archived from the original on April 9, 2008. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  21. ^ Strachota, Dan (July 18, 2001). "Revenge is Sweet". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on September 23, 2021. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  22. ^ a b Pereira, Alyssa (December 19, 2016). "Owner of DNA Lounge, on verge of closing club, calls for 'ideas' to keep it open". SF Gate.
  23. ^ Thomas, Evany (July 16, 2001). "From Netscape to Nightclub". Wired.
  24. ^ Joshua Quittner; Michelle Slatalla (1998). Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft. Atlantic Monthly Press. ISBN 978-0-87113-709-8.
  25. ^ Seibel, Peter (September 16, 2009). Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. Apress. ISBN 978-1-4302-1948-4.
  26. ^ a b Seibel, Peter. "Coders at Work". Apress. Retrieved May 1, 2023.
  27. ^ "California Dreamin': The Gold Rush". ColourFIELD. 2001. Retrieved May 1, 2023.
  28. ^ "California Dreamin': The Gold Rush (video)". Colorfield. 2001. Retrieved May 1, 2023.
  29. ^ "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing". Computer History Museum. 2011. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  30. ^ "Jamie Zawinski Interview". Sleep Mode: The Art of the Screensaver. January 27, 2017. Retrieved December 24, 2020.
  31. ^ Eric S. Raymond The Art of UNIX Programming, p.313
  32. ^ Raymond, Eric S. (December 29, 2003). "The Jargon File". Jargon File Text Archive. Retrieved May 1, 2023.
  33. ^ Zawinski, Jamie [@jwz] (November 24, 2020). "My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization" (Tweet). Retrieved February 13, 2021 – via Twitter.
  34. ^ Seibel, Peter (October 16, 2009). "C++ in Coders at Work". Gigamonkeys. Archived from the original on September 22, 2010. Retrieved April 29, 2013.
  35. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (2013). "jwzhacks". Retrieved April 29, 2013.
  36. ^ Friedl, Jeffrey (September 15, 2006). "Source of the famous "Now you have two problems" quote". regex.info. Retrieved May 1, 2023.
  37. ^ Zawinski, Jamie. "Java sucks". jwz.org. Archived from the original on June 16, 2000. Retrieved April 29, 2013.

External links[edit]

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