Jamie Zawinski

Jamie Zawinski
Born	Jamie Werner Zawinski (1968-11-03) November 3, 1968 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Software developer, blogger, cultural entrepreneur, nightclub owner
Years active	1984–present
Known for	Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, XScreenSaver, DNA Lounge

Jamie Werner Zawinski (born November 3, 1968), widely recognized by the moniker jwz, is an American software developer, blogger, and cultural entrepreneur. He is well-known for his influential work on Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, the Mozilla.org, as well as the XScreenSaver project. Additionally, he is the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a renowned nightclub and live music venue located in San Francisco.

Biography

Zawinski’s programming journey began at age 16 when he contributed to Scott Fahlman’s Spice Lisp initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. Subsequently, he gained experience at AI startup Expert Technologies, Inc. and within the artificial intelligence research division at UC Berkeley, specializing in natural language processing.

In 1990, he joined Lucid Inc., where his responsibilities included work on Lucid Common Lisp and the Energize C++ integrated development environment. Zawinski played a pivotal role in incorporating GNU Emacs as the text editor within the IDE, which ultimately led to a divergence in development philosophies and the emergence of Lucid Emacs (now known as XEmacs).

By 1992, he had launched the inaugural version of XScreenSaver, a complimentary suite now containing over 240 screensavers. Initially designed for Unix systems, it later expanded compatibility to macOS, iOS, and Android platforms. Beyond screensavers, it offers screen blanking and locking functionality on Unix. Zawinski remains actively involved in its upkeep and regularly issues updates.

Netscape and Mozilla

Following Lucid’s bankruptcy in 1994, Zawinski became one of the initial employees at Mosaic Communications (which later became Netscape). He was responsible for developing the Unix edition of Netscape Navigator 1.0 and subsequently created Netscape Mail, notable as the first mail client to support HTML natively.

The term "Mozilla" was coined by Zawinski during an internal meeting; it combines "Mosaic killer" with a nod to Godzilla. He also embedded an easter egg in Netscape: typing "about:jwz" directed users to his personal homepage and triggered an animation featuring a fire-breathing dragon.

A dedicated proponent of free software, Zawinski played a key role in Netscape’s decision to release its browser source code as open source in 1998. He was among the founders of Mozilla.org, registering its domain on the very day Netscape announced open sourcing and contributing significantly during its formative year.

After AOL acquired Netscape in 1999, Zawinski reaffirmed Mozilla’s independence from Netscape. He departed the company a year later, citing dissatisfaction with plans favoring a complete browser rewrite instead of incremental improvements.

DNA Lounge

Shortly after his departure from Mozilla, Zawinski acquired DNA Lounge, a nightclub situated in San Francisco, in 1999 for approximately five million dollars. The venue reopened under his ownership in July 2001, with Zawinski extensively chronicling the renovation process through his blog titled "DNA Sequencing". In 2016, confronted with declining attendance figures, he investigated alternative financial approaches to maintain the club’s operations.

Interviews and appearances

In 2000, Zawinski featured prominently in the PBS documentary Code Rush, which documented the establishment of Mozilla.org and the release of its browser source code. His experiences are also detailed in Josh Quittner’s 1998 publication Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft as well as Glyn Moody’s 2001 work Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution.

Peter Seibel’s 2009 book Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming contains a dedicated chapter about him. In addition, he appeared in the German documentary California Dreamin': The Gold Rush released in 2001.

Zawinski is also featured within video installations at the Computer History Museum’s exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing and participated in Sleep Mode: The Art of the Screensaver, a 2017 gallery show curated by Rafaël Rozendaal at Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut.

Zawinski's Law

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, commonly referred to as Zawinski's Law, observes that as software becomes more popular, it tends to accumulate additional features, often leading to software bloat. In 2020, Zawinski provided further clarification on this concept:

Principles

Although Zawinski initially made his mark as a Lisp developer, his primary programming language is C. He is critical of programming languages that lack memory safety and automatic memory management, particularly denouncing C++ as an "abomination... the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's an object system".

While Zawinski has authored numerous utilities using Perl, he characterizes Perl as "combining all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable," blending the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

He has also expressed criticism towards Java, particularly regarding its class overhead and how Sun conflated the language, libraries, virtual machine, and security framework under a single brand—an approach he sees as harmful. Despite some advantages, he reverted to using C because "it's still the only way to ship portable programs".