Jamie Zawinski

Last updated
Jamie Zawinski
Born
James Werner Zawinski

(1968-11-03) November 3, 1968 (age 55)
Website www.jwz.org

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

Contents

Biography

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 began working at Lucid Inc., first working on Lucid Common Lisp, and then on Lucid's Energize C++ IDE. Lucid decided to use GNU Emacs as the text editor for their 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 GNU Emacs and Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs). [1]

In 1992 he released the first version of XScreenSaver, a free and open-source collection now containing more than 240 [2] screensavers. Initially released for Unix, it now supports macOS, iOS, and Android as well. On Unix systems, it also provides the framework for blanking and locking the screen. He still maintains it, with new releases coming out several times a year. [3]

Netscape and Mozilla

Following Lucid's bankruptcy in 1994, Zawinski was one of the initial employees of Mosaic Communications, later known as Netscape. At 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 came up with the name "Mozilla" (originally the internal code-name of the web browser) during a staff meeting, as a reference to Godzilla and a portmanteau of "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 would take the user to his home page, and would change the browser's logo animation to a fire-breathing dragon. [9]

Through his long-time support and advocacy for free software both inside and outside the company, Zawinski is credited with having been the inspiration for Netscape's decision to open-source the source code of the browser in 1998. [10] [11] He was a founder of Mozilla.org, personally 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] And a 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

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 5 million dollars and it was re-opened in July 2001, a process which he documented extensively in a blog named "DNA Sequencing". [22] [23]

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

Interviews and appearances

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 over the course of 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] And 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 also 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

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, also known as Zawinski's Law, 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 himself 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

Zawinski first attained prominence as a Lisp programmer, but most of his larger projects are written in C. Despite that, 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]

Though he has written and published many utilities in Perl, [35] he is not without his criticisms, characterizing 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 he encountered while programming 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. Despite the positive aspects, ultimately Zawinski returned to programming in C "since it's still the only way to ship portable programs". [37]

Related Research Articles

Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee, Brendan Eich, created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages. A founding engineer of Netscape, Lou Montulli, created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XEmacs</span>

XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows. XEmacs is a fork, based on a version of GNU Emacs from the late 1980s. Any user can download, use, and modify XEmacs as free software available under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.

Gosling Emacs is a discontinued Emacs implementation written in 1981 by James Gosling in C.

Feature creep is the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, especially in computer software, video games and consumer and business electronics. These extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and can result in software bloat and over-complication, rather than simple design.

Worse is better is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in a 1989 essay to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.

The Book of Mozilla is a computer Easter egg found in the Netscape, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Waterfox and Firefox series of web browsers. It is viewed by directing the browser to about:mozilla.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XScreenSaver</span> Screensaver software

XScreenSaver is a free and open-source collection of 240+ screensavers for Unix, macOS, iOS and Android operating systems. It was created by Jamie Zawinski in 1992 and is still maintained by him, with new releases coming out several times a year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DNA Lounge</span> Nightclub and pizza restaurant in San Francisco, California

DNA Lounge is an all-ages nightclub and restaurant/cafe in the SoMa district of San Francisco owned by Jamie Zawinski, a former Netscape programmer and open-source software hacker. The club features DJ dancing, live music, burlesque performances, and occasionally conferences, private parties, and film premieres.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape 6</span>

Netscape 6 is a discontinued Internet suite developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the sixth major release of the Netscape series of browsers. It superseded Netscape Communicator (4.x), as the release of Netscape Communicator 5 was scrapped. Netscape 6 was the first browser of the Netscape line to be based on another source code: Mozilla Application Suite, an open-source software package from the Mozilla Foundation, which was created by Netscape in 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brendan Eich</span> American computer scientist and technology executive

Brendan Eich is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his firm opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.

The history of the Mozilla Application Suite began with the release of the source code of the Netscape suite as an open source project. Going through years of hard work, Mozilla 1.0 was eventually released on June 5, 2002. Its backend code base, most notably the Gecko layout engine, has become the foundation of a number of applications based on Mozilla, including the Mozilla Foundation's flagship product Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. While the suite is no longer a formal Mozilla product, its development and maintenance is continued as the SeaMonkey community project.

Richard P. Gabriel is an American computer scientist known for his work in computing related to the programming language Lisp, and especially Common Lisp. His best known work was a 1990 essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big", which introduced the phrase Worse is Better, and his set of benchmarks for Lisp, termed Gabriel Benchmarks, published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems. These became a standard way to benchmark Lisp implementations.

Lucid Incorporated was a Menlo Park, California-based computer software development company. Founded by Richard P. Gabriel in 1984, it went bankrupt in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Stallman</span> American free software activist and GNU Project founder (born 1953)

Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.

Mork is a computer file format used by several email clients and web browsers produced by Netscape and Mozilla Foundation. It was developed by David McCusker with the aim of creating a minimal database replacement that would be reliable, flexible, and efficient, and use a file format close to plain text.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape (web browser)</span> Family of web browsers

The Netscape web browser is the general name for a series of web browsers formerly produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, which eventually became a subsidiary of AOL. The original browser was once the dominant browser in terms of usage share, but as a result of the first browser war, it lost virtually all of its share to Internet Explorer due to Microsoft's anti-competitive bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape Mail & Newsgroups</span>

Netscape Mail and Newsgroups, commonly known as just Netscape Mail, was an email and news client produced by Netscape Communications Corporation as part of the Netscape series of suites between versions 2.0 to 7.2. In the 2.x and 3.x series, it was bundled with the web browser. In the 4.x series, it was rewritten as two separate programs known as Netscape Messenger and Netscape Collabra.

A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite uses no existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Emacs</span> GNU version of the Emacs text editor

GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor."

Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.4, released June 2024.

References

  1. Zawinski, Jamie (2000-02-11). "The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism" . Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  2. "List of screen savers included in the collection". XScreenSaver. 2020-12-08. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  3. "Release history". XScreenSaver. 2020-12-08. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  4. "Netscape Navigator's "about:authors" page". 1994-12-15. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  5. Steinert-Threlkeld, Tom (1995-10-31). "Can You Work in Netscape Time?". Fast Company magazine.
  6. Zawinski, Jamie (2017-11-20). "HTML email, was that your fault?". jwz.org blog. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  7. Zawinski, Jamie (1996). "The Netscape Dorm". jwz.org. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  8. Dave Titus with assistance from Andrew Wong (2002-12-01). "How was Mozilla born: The story of the first mascot on the Internet" . Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  9. Zawinski, Jamie (2011-12-03). "The secret history of the about:jwz URL". jwz.org. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  10. Suárez-Potts, Louis (2001-05-01). "Interview: Frank Hecker". OpenOffice. Archived from the original on 2001-08-07. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  11. 1 2 Moody, Glyn (2001-02-18). 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 (1999-01-03). "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 (1998-03-23). "Netscape's Hail Mary". Archived from the original on 2002-02-23.
  15. Zawinski, Jamie (1998-11-23). "Fear and loathing on the merger trail". Mozilla . Retrieved 2013-04-29.
  16. Zawinski, Jamie (1999-03-31). "Resignation and postmortem". Archived from the original on 2004-08-07. Retrieved 2013-03-29.
  17. Festa, Paul (1999-04-01). "AOL, Mozilla lose key evangelist". CNET. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  18. Knauss, Greg (2000-11-07). "Hacking the City". Stating the Obvious. Archived from the original on 2021-05-14. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  19. Leonard, Andrew (2000-02-10). "Free the night life!". Salon . Retrieved 2013-04-29.
  20. Thomas, Evany (2001-07-16). "From Netscape to Nightclub". Wired. Archived from the original on 2008-04-09. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  21. Strachota, Dan (2001-07-18). "Revenge is Sweet". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on 2021-09-23. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  22. 1 2 Pereira, Alyssa (2016-12-19). "Owner of DNA Lounge, on verge of closing club, calls for 'ideas' to keep it open". SF Gate.
  23. Thomas, Evany (2001-07-16). "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 (2009-09-16). Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. Apress. ISBN   978-1-4302-1948-4.
  26. 1 2 Seibel, Peter. "Coders at Work". Apress. Retrieved 1 May 2023.
  27. "California Dreamin': The Gold Rush". ColourFIELD. 2001. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  28. "California Dreamin': The Gold Rush (video)". Colorfield. 2001. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  29. "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing". Computer History Museum. 2011. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  30. "Jamie Zawinski Interview". Sleep Mode: The Art of the Screensaver. 2017-01-27. Retrieved 2020-12-24.
  31. Eric S. Raymond The Art of UNIX Programming, p.313
  32. Raymond, Eric S. (2003-12-29). "The Jargon File". Jargon File Text Archive. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  33. Zawinski, Jamie [@jwz] (2020-11-24). "My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization" (Tweet). Retrieved 2021-02-13 via Twitter.
  34. Seibel, Peter (2009-10-16). "C++ in Coders at Work". Gigamonkeys. Archived from the original on 2010-09-22. Retrieved 2013-04-29.
  35. Zawinski, Jamie (2013). "jwzhacks" . Retrieved 2013-04-29.
  36. Friedl, Jeffrey (2006-09-15). "Source of the famous "Now you have two problems" quote". regex.info. Retrieved 2023-05-01.
  37. Zawinski, Jamie. "Java sucks". jwz.org. Archived from the original on 2000-06-16. Retrieved 2013-04-29.