Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Former Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski has spent his life making software free. Now he wants to liberate San Francisco's fading club scene.
Feb 10, 2000 | Jamie Zawinski has a face the camera can only love. Framed beneath lush, long dark hair, his intelligent, expressive eyes and ready, ironic smile draw attention like a magnet. For reporters, his habit of dispensing painfully articulate, often outrageous soundbites is equally attractive -- one reason why the former Netscape programmer steals most of the scenes in "Code Rush," an upcoming PBS documentary that focuses on the hectic lives of a team of Netscape coders during the spring of 1998.
On the first Wednesday in February, an advance viewing of "Code Rush" debuted at a Mountain View, Calif., studio, about a 45-minute drive south of San Francisco. The hour-long documentary is worth watching. The specific time period captured on film covers a crucial moment in the history of the "free-software movement" -- that frantic couple of months during which Netscape programmers scrambled to clean up the hitherto proprietary source code to the Navigator Web browser so that it could be released as publicly accessible open-source software.
But Zawinski couldn't make the screening -- he had another commitment, an appearance that same night before the Board of Appeals of the San Francisco Planning Commission. Zawinski may have quit Netscape in a disgusted huff a little less than a year ago, angry at the constant delays plaguing the development of a new version of Navigator, but that doesn't mean the 30-year-old stock-option millionaire has stopped agitating. For the better part of the last year, in the face of concerted resistance from the San Francisco Police Department and to the delight of a picturesque collection of San Francisco's late night entertainment habitues, Zawinski has been struggling to achieve a new dream -- the purchase of the DNA Lounge, a nightclub.
In a scene that simply reeked of wacky San Francisco-ness, Zawinski packed the Board of Appeals hearing with at least 150 fans sporting "Save SF Late Night Culture" stickers -- most of whom were pale-skinned and punk/gothic fashionable enough to qualify for parts as undead extras on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
The Zawinski contingent far outnumbered the handful of residents who came to speak in support of the SFPD's attempt to use the DNA's change of ownership to revoke the DNA's extensive after-hours operating permits.
For the past several years, the South of Market region of San Francisco has been witness to steadily increasing tension between clubs, some residents and the police. As far as club owners and patrons are concerned, the police, acting on behalf of flush and easily annoyed new residents, are engaged in an organized crackdown on the clubs. The dispute over the DNA's after-hours permits is just the latest skirmish.
"San Francisco's clubs are under pressure," says Zawinski, over a sushi lunch in downtown San Francisco's spanking new and ultra-high-tech Sony Metreon building. "And I thought, well, maybe I could try and do something about that. I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but I was doing it because it was something that mattered to me, and not something that could make money, because it's not."
Zawinski's motivation, he says, is akin to one of the key forces that pushes the free-software movement forward. He's "scratching his itch," he says, quoting Eric Raymond, one of the chief evangelists for free software. Programmers appreciate free software -- software in which the underlying source code is freely accessible and modifiable -- in part because oftentimes they simply want to solve a particular problem they face in their daily coding life, or satisfy an urge to add some new, special feature to their software. Enjoying access to the source code allows them to satisfy those needs -- to scratch those itches.
For Zawinski, the current irritation that needs assuaging is what he sees as a marked decline in the number of late-night venues for dancing and live concerts in San Francisco. So Zawinski has set his sights on fixing what he sees as a bug in the city's operating system. This time around, however, he isn't taking advantage of publicly available source code, but instead is capitalizing on the millions of dollars that became the birthright of all early employees of Netscape.
