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The Net scare
The Web will survive this week's spate of site attacks. Can it get past the hysteria?
By Scott Rosenberg
[02/10/00]

Mozilla dreams
Can the open-source browser redeem Netscape's name and give Microsoft a run for its money?
By Andrew Leonard
[02/10/00]

Criminal code?
A judge's decision to ban a DVD-playing Linux program and all discussion about it outrages the free-software community.
By C. Scott Ananian
[02/09/00]

The waiting game
Will John Romero's Daikatana ever hit the shelves? When it does, will first-person shooter players still care?
By Howard Wen
[02/08/00]

Technology: View from the top
Bill Gates' other CEO
The Corbis digital archive is privately held by Gates, but it's former human rights attorney Steve Davis' job to make it work.
By Patrizia DiLucchio
[02/07/00]

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Part of the backstory to the struggle over the DNA is the increasing gentrification of the South of Market region. The Northern California economy is awash with money -- much of it made from the same dot-com industry that bestowed its largesse on Zawinski. Though not the only factor putting pressure on the nightclubs, the arrival of well-heeled new residents snapping up half-million-dollar condominiums is one reason why the police are cracking down.

To some observers, the showdown is just one more example of how the dot-com economy is reshaping San Francisco, or, to put it more stridently, how the Internet is ruining San Francisco. But the story isn't quite that simple. Jamie Zawinski, as a key Netscape programmer, is as responsible as any single person for delivering the code that made the Internet economy possible. But is he ruining San Francisco? Hardly -- he's attempting to make his own changes, to fight against the tide. And it's not all that quixotic a mission. Zawinski's appearance at the board of appeals was a huge success -- the commissioners unanimously agreed to deny the police their attempt to change the DNA's permits.

The dot-com economy may take away ... but it also giveth.

Among the journalists and hackers who pay attention to the world of free software, Jamie Zawinski is notorious for a whole laundry list of reasons. At Netscape, where for a time he lived inside a camouflage tent spread over his cubicle, and shaved one side of his head while letting hair on the other grow long, Zawinski became an obvious focal point for the hordes of Netscape observers frantic to get a close look at the new world of the Net. Zawinski's legend only grew when, on April 1, exactly one year to the day after helping to organize a huge party to celebrate the public release of the Navigator source code, he quit Netscape, denouncing the entire project, known as "Mozilla," as hopelessly flawed. Ever since, the trade press has labeled Mozilla a free-software failure.

Mention Zawinski's name around Mozilla folks these days and you are likely to get a deep sigh. Zawinski's penchant for telling it like it is, or at least like he thinks it is (a characteristic he shares with many hackers), was a public relations disaster. When I told one consultant who works with Netscape that I'd been having a hard time getting Zawinski to make any further comments about Mozilla, the consultant shrugged his shoulders.

"Hasn't he said enough already?" wondered the consultant.

Some of the South of Market residents who supported the SFPD's attempt to cut back on the DNA's operating hours are also wont to grumble. At the board of appeals hearing, Jim Meko, president of the South of Market Resident's Association (SOMARA), called Zawinski "arrogant" and attacked him for having hired "paid political consultants" to manipulate the local press. At the hearing, other SOMARA members could be seen visibly grimacing in annoyance when Zawinski pointedly made reference to his former Netscape employment while addressing the board -- apparently, it wasn't the first time Zawinski had touted his Netscape lineage.

But in the insular world of free software programmers Zawinski's reputation dates back to long before he ever wrote a single line of code for Netscape. In the early '90s, Zawinski worked at Lucid, a Bay Area start-up that sold high-end programming tools. Zawinski's main contribution to Lucid was the creation of Lucid Emacs, a new version of one of the most popular free software tools then in existence -- the Emacs text editor, originally written by a programmer named Richard Stallman.

Stallman is the founding father of the organized wing of the free software movement. Long before Linux began spreading throughout the computing universe, programmers all over the world used Emacs as their all-purpose workhorse. But there was a problem, according to Lucid. In the early '90s, says Zawinski, the pace of Emacs development had slowed to a near standstill. Lucid management desired a version of Emacs that included a set of features that didn't yet exist. Since the program was free software, that presented no great difficulty -- eventually, Zawinski added most of the necessary features himself.

"Emacs [version number] 19 wasn't done yet," says Zawinski, "so I solved the problem by writing my own version of Emacs 19. One thing led to another, and that didn't work out, so we released our own 'fork' of Emacs 19 -- 'Lucid emacs' which has now been renamed Xemacs. And it's still alive today, because it has features and a design that a lot of people find more compelling than the other Emacs."

One thing led to another ... Buried in that throw-away phrase is an instructive bit of early free software history. Stallman and the Lucid developers did not see eye-to-eye on a series of questions, including who to blame for the delay in Emacs 19, what feature set to include in new versions of Emacs, and, perhaps most importantly, the proposed inclusion of Lucid Emacs in the otherwise proprietary tool kit of programs that Lucid was attempting to sell. The result was the last thing that anybody in the free software community wants to happen to a given project -- a dreaded "fork": the creation of two separate development trees for a single software program.

"Back then we were Satan [to Stallman]," recalls Zawinski. "We were the enemy as far as I can tell. Hopefully he has recalibrated at this point."

Moral of the Emacs story? Programmers can be very stubborn -- Stallman, to be sure, is legendary for his intransigence. But Zawinski is equally difficult to deter -- indeed, it requires a special degree of chutzpah to write an entirely new version of one of the most famous programs in the free software arsenal.

But hardheadedness can be a virtue, even if it does lead to the occasional debilitating fork. The success of the free-software movement owes a lot to arrogant programmers who are dead certain that they are absolutely, unshakably right. Zawinski's willingness to grapple with Stallman was a sign that he would not give up easily when thwarted. And going head to head with Stallman, no doubt, is an experience not all that different from attempting to fight city hall.

Next page | Zawinski decides to stop whining and fix San Francisco's bugs