Jamie Zawinski Biography

Occup.	Scientist
From	USA
Born	November 3, 1968
Age	56 years

Early Life
Jamie Zawinski, often recognized merely as "jwz", was born in 1968 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Zawinski developed an early interest in computers and shows, leading him to participate in college at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in his home town. He did not finish his degree, as CMU eliminated his scholarship after he went to a demonstration that involved painting a pathway.

Mozilla and Netscape
Zawinski increased to prominence in the early 1990s when he began working at the start-up business Netscape Communications Corporation, founded by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. His shows skills and brash mindset quickly moved him through the ranks, eventually turning into one of the company's lead engineers. At Netscape, Zawinski played a crucial function in developing their flagship web browser, Netscape Navigator, which would later develop into the Mozilla task.

During his period at Netscape, Zawinski's deal with the Emacs Lisp programming language heavily affected the advancement of JavaScript, among the most widely-used web advancement languages today. He also established XScreenSaver, a popular totally free screensaver collection for Unix-based os, which he still maintains.

In 1998, Netscape announced that their source code would be released under an open-source license, and Zawinski played a necessary role in making this take place. The project that emerged from this decision, Mozilla, would ultimately establish the popular web internet browser Firefox.

Zawinski left the company in 1999 after the acquisition of Netscape by AOL, expressing disappointment with the direction the business was headed after the merger. He moved back to San Francisco, California, where he would later on become involved in various internet-based projects.

San Francisco Projects
In 1999, after leaving Netscape, Zawinski bought the historic San Francisco DNA Lounge club, which had actually been running because 1985. With an enthusiasm for live music, he invested greatly in retrofitting the place and upgrading its audio and video innovation. Under his ownership, the DNA Lounge has ended up being a staple of the San Francisco nightlife and live music scene, hosting a diverse range of events and entertainers.

Zawinski likewise developed the website "Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King" in 2000, a web album where users might send and vote on their favorite jack-o'-lantern carvings.

Contributions to the Open Source Community
Although no longer involved in Mozilla, Zawinski continued to contribute to open-source software application tasks, particularly concentrating on Unix-based systems. In 2000, he began the Unix port of the open-source game "XBill", and in 2001, he co-founded the Xfce desktop environment task, which is still popular today amongst Linux users.

Jamie Zawinski is likewise understood for creating one of the earliest regular expressions libraries, called the "regex" library. His deal with this library and its eventual inclusion in the GNU Public License software added to the extensive use of regular expressions in programs.

Legacy
Jamie Zawinski's contributions to the early advancement of web browsers, JavaScript, and open-source software application have left a lasting effect on the tech market. His involvement in tasks like Mozilla and Netscape, along with his numerous contributions to the open-source community, have actually made him a place among the leaders of the early web period. Today, Zawinski continues to be involved in technology and the arts through his continuous work on software jobs and his ownership of the DNA Lounge in San Francisco.

Our collection contains 17 quotes who is written / told by Jamie.

Related authors: Jim Clark (Businessman), Lawrence Taylor (Athlete), Marc Andreessen (Businessman)

17 Famous quotes by Jamie Zawinski

"Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer"

"On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense"

"I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more"

"Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless"

"My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others"

"I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot"

"Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?"

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes"

"See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy"

"Mostly I use the O2 as an X terminal, however, running my apps on Linux and displaying remotely"

"If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works"

"I use a really simple calendar program on my computer"

"I don't get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card"

"Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!"

"Linux is only free if your time has no value"

"I eat and drink at my desk, but I'm a tidy eater"

"And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux"