Word: zawinski
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Dates: during 1998-1998
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Netscape's exploding popularity was almost unimaginable. Suddenly, www.website addresses were everywhere--on billboards, buses, blimps. How do you surf the Net? With a browser! With Netscape! "We were the ones who put the Internet in people's homes," says Jamie Zawinski, Netscape employee No. 20. Zawinski is typical of the kind of person who gravitated to Netscape in those early years. When he applied to Andreessen for a job, his resume listed his career objective as "To improve people's lives through software...
...Jamie Zawinski had already toiled at two failed start-ups by the time he went to work for Netscape in 1994. Finally, he figured, things would be different. "These guys are going to be so rich, it's not funny," he believed. Not that Zawinski cared about money. Though Silicon Valley is supposed to be the new Hollywood for programmers, where ambitious code-writing kids slave at start-ups with every expectation of retiring by supper, Zawinski is a hacker of the old school. He has always aspired to something grander: to change the world...
This, as I said, was almost four years ago, when, to all outward appearances, Microsoft was a sleeping giant that hadn't yet awakened to the Internet blooming all around it. So Zawinski and his compadres put in 120-hour weeks. They had no lives. They coded until the sun rose, then slept under their desks. And in October 1994 they launched their killer app, known initially--forgive the hubris--as Mozilla. It was a play on Godzilla, as in "Mozilla will rule...
...Zawinski and his co-workers had another idea: Don't give away just the Netscape browser, give away the source code too. This is like Coca-Cola's giving away free six-packs and the secret recipe as well, so you can make Coke at home. Here's the reasoning: Microsoft is so much bigger, and can throw so many programmers at any problem, that Netscape's only chance is to harness the talents of the thousands of hackers on the Net who might be willing to improve on the program if they had a stake in it. "I wouldn...
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