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Jamie Werner Zawinski (born November 3, 1968), commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, , and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, XEmacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and Music venue in San Francisco.
In 1990 he began working at Lucid Inc., first working on Lucid Common Lisp, and then 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, 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 of the project into GNU Emacs and Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs).
In 1992 he released the first version of XScreenSaver, a free and open-source collection now containing more than 240
and later, Netscape Mail, the first mail reader (or Usenet reader) to natively support HTML.
Zawinski came up with the name "Mozilla" (originally the internal code-name of the web browser) during a staff meeting, as a reference to Godzilla and a portmanteau of "Mosaic killer".
An easter egg he coded in the Netscape browser became quite well known during the early days of the World Wide Web: 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 both inside and outside the company, Zawinski is credited with having been the inspiration for Netscape's decision to open-source the source code of the browser in 1998.
Jim Hamerly and Tom Paquin with Susan Walton (1999). 9780596553906, O'Reilly Media, Inc.. . ISBN 9780596553906
When Netscape was acquired by AOL in 1999, he wrote a bulletin explaining that Mozilla's work would continue with or without Netscape.
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.
Zawinski features extensively in Josh Quittner's 1998 book Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft,
and in Glyn Moody's 2001 book, .
There is a chapter on Zawinski in Peter Seibel's 2009 book, .
Zawinski appears in several video installations at the Computer History Museum's exhibit, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
He was also featured in Sleep Mode: The Art of the Screensaver,
Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of with popular features.
Eric S. Raymond The Art of UNIX Programming, p.313
Though he has written and published many utilities in Perl,
He has criticized several language and library deficiencies he encountered while programming in Java, specifically the overhead of certain fundamental classes but especially the marketing and politics behind it that led Sun Microsystems to conflate the language, the class library, the virtual machine, 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".
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