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, with Marc Andreessen's help, 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".
In 2000, Zawinski starred in the 60 minute long PBS documentary "Code Rush". However, the footage was taken during 1998 while Zawinski was still working for Netscape in which he is portrayed as a pivotal person in the company. In addition, he underlined his preference for the night scene which led him to buy a nightclub.
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. When Netscape was acquired by AOL he wrote a famous bulletin explaining the nature of the Free Software Mozilla code. He resigned from Netscape Communications Corporation on April 1, 1999. His current occupation is managing his DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco.
Read more about this topic: Jamie Zawinski
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