Jamie Werner Zawinski (born November 3, 1968), commonly known as jwz, is an American

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

ger, and

impresario An impresario (from Italian ''impresa'', 'an enterprise or undertaking') is a person who organizes and often finances concerts, Play (theatre), plays, or operas, performing a role in stage arts that is similar to that of a film producer, film or ...

. He is best known for his role in the creation of

Netscape Navigator The 1990s releases of the Netscape (web browser), Netscape line referred to as Netscape Navigator were a series of now discontinued web browsers. from versions 1 to 4.08. It was the Core product, flagship product of the Netscape, Netscape Comm ...

, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the

proprietor Ownership is the state or fact of legal possession and control over property, which may be any asset, tangible or intangible. Ownership can involve multiple rights, collectively referred to as ''title'', which may be separated and held by diffe ...

DNA Lounge DNA Lounge is an all-ages nightclub, restaurant and coffeehouse, cafe in the SoMa district of San Francisco owned by Jamie Zawinski, a former Netscape programmer and open-source software hacker (free and open source software), hacker. The clu ...

, a

nightclub A nightclub or dance club is a club that is open at night, usually for drinking, dancing and other entertainment. Nightclubs often have a Bar (establishment), bar and discotheque (usually simply known as disco) with a dance floor, laser lighti ...

and live music venue in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

Biography

Zawinski's programming career began at age 16 with

Scott Fahlman Scott Elliott Fahlman (born March 21, 1948) is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated pla ...

Spice Lisp Spice Lisp (Scientific Personal Integrated Computing Environment) is a programming language, a dialect of Lisp. Its implementation, originally written by Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Spice Lisp Group, targeted the microcode of the 16-bit work ...

project at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

. He then worked at AI startup Expert Technologies, Inc. followed by

Robert Wilensky Robert Wilensky (26 March 1951 – 15 March 2013) was an American computer scientist and emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, with his main focus of research in artificial intelligence. Academic career In 1971, Wilensky ...

and

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born 14 December 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is th ...

's AI research group at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

, working on

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

. In 1990 he began working at

Lucid Inc. Lucid Incorporated was a Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, California-based computer software development company. Founded by Richard P. Gabriel in 1984, it went bankrupt in 1994. History The first CEO was Tony Slocum, formerly of IntelliCorp ...

, first working on Lucid Common Lisp, and then on Lucid's Energize C++ IDE. Lucid decided to use

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 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 ...

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 In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods either to h ...

of the project into GNU Emacs and Lucid Emacs (now

XEmacs 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 ...

). In 1992 he released the first version of XScreenSaver, a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

collection now containing more than 240

screensaver A screensaver (or screen saver) is a computer program that blanks the display screen or fills it with moving images or patterns when the computer has been idle for a designated time. The original purpose of screensavers was to prevent phosphor s ...

s. Initially released for

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

, it now supports

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

, 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.

Netscape and Mozilla

Following Lucid's

bankrupt Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the de ...

cy in 1994, Zawinski was one of the initial employees of Mosaic Communications, later known as

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

. At Netscape, he developed the

release of

1.0, and later, Netscape Mail, the first mail reader (or

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

reader) to natively support

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

. Zawinski came up with the name "

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

" (originally the internal code-name of the web browser) during a staff meeting, as a reference to

Godzilla is a fictional monster, or ''kaiju'', that debuted in the eponymous 1954 film, directed and co-written by Ishirō Honda. The character has since become an international pop culture icon, appearing in various media: 33 Japanese films p ...

and a

portmanteau In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together.

of "

Mosaic A mosaic () is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/Mortar (masonry), mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and ...

killer". An

easter egg Easter eggs, also called Paschal eggs, are eggs that are decorated for the Christian holiday of Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. As such, Easter eggs are commonly used during the season of Eastertide (Easter season). The ...

he coded in the Netscape browser became quite well known during the early days of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

: 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. Through his long-time support and advocacy for

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

both inside and outside the company, Zawinski is credited with having been the inspiration for Netscape's decision to

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

of the browser in 1998. 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. When Netscape was acquired by

AOL AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. The service traces its history to an online ...

in 1999, he wrote a bulletin explaining that Mozilla's work would continue with or without Netscape. 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.

DNA Lounge

Shortly after leaving Mozilla, he announced his purchase of

, a

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

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 Josh Quittner (born February 12, 1957) is an American journalist. He is CEO of Decrypt Media, a website which covers cryptocurrencies, NFTs and Web3. Early life and education Born in Manhattan, Quittner grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. He i ...

's 1998 book ''Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft'', and in

Glyn Moody Glyn Moody is a London-based technology writer. He is best known for his book '' Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution'' (2001). It describes the evolution and significance of the free software and open source movements with interviews ...

's 2001 book, '' Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution''. There is a chapter on Zawinski in Peter Seibel's 2009 book, '' Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming''. And in 2001, he was featured in ''California Dreamin': The Gold Rush'', a documentary for German public television. Zawinski appears in several

video installations Video installation is a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. Tracing its origins to the birth of video art in the 1970s, it has ...

at the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

's exhibit, ''Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing''. He was also featured in ''Sleep Mode: The Art of the Screensaver'', 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: Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of

software bloat Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version, while making only dubious ...

ing with popular features. Eric S. Raymond ''The Art of UNIX Programming''
p.313
Zawinski stated, in 2020:

Principles

Zawinski first attained prominence as a

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

programmer, but most of his larger projects are written in C. Despite that, he has long been critical of languages lacking

memory safety Memory safety is the state of being protected from various software bugs and security vulnerabilities when dealing with memory access, such as buffer overflows and dangling pointers. For example, Java is said to be memory-safe because its ru ...

and

automatic memory management In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The ''garbage collector'' attempts to reclaim memory that was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called ''garbage''. Gar ...

. 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". Though he has written and published many utilities in

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, 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 PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

." He has criticized several language and library deficiencies he encountered while programming in

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, specifically the overhead of certain fundamental classes but especially the marketing and politics behind it that led

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

to conflate the language, the class library, the

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

, 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".

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Zawinski, Jamie 1968 births Living people American male bloggers American bloggers Emacs Free software programmers American Internet celebrities Mozilla developers Mozilla people Open source people Netscape people People from Pittsburgh Nightclub owners Netscape