Jamie W. Zawinski (born November 3, 1968 in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), commonly known as
jwz, is a former professional
American computer
programmer responsible for significant contributions to the
free software projects
Mozilla and
XEmacs, and early versions of the
Netscape Navigator web browser. He maintains the
XScreenSaver project which provides
screenblanking for
Unix-like computer
operating systems using the
X Window System.
Zawinski is currently the
proprietor of the
DNA Lounge, a
nightclub in
San Francisco.
Biography
Zawinski's early career included stints with
Scott Fahlman's Lisp research group at
Carnegie Mellon University,
Expert Technologies, Inc. and Robert Wilensky and
Peter Norvig's group at Berkeley. In the early 1990s, he was hired by
Richard P. Gabriel's
Lucid Inc. where he was eventually put to work 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. 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
XEmacs.
Zawinski worked on the early releases of
Netscape Navigator, particularly the 1.0 release of the
Unix version. He became quite well known in the early days of the
world wide web through an
easter egg in the Netscape browser: typing "about:jwz" into the address box would take the user to his home page (a similar trick worked for other Netscape staffers). In addition, Zawinski says he created the name "Mozilla".
Zawinski was a major proponent of
opening the
source code of the Mozilla browser, but became disillusioned with the project when others decided to rewrite the code instead of incrementally improving it. He resigned from
Netscape Communications Corporation on April 1, 1999. His current occupation is managing his
DNA Lounge nightclub in
San Francisco.
Quotes
Peter Norvig in
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: "One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub."
Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment (also known as
Zawinski's Law) relates the pressure of popularity to the phenomenon of
software bloat:
A long time member of the UNIX-HATERS mailing list, Jamie was quoted in the "X-Windows Disaster" chapter of
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, commenting about
widget toolkits for the
X Window System:
See also
