After the early years of the XCF, both the club's membership and production level ebbed and flowed. But another fertile period emerged in the mid- to late 1990s, when the XCF, led by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, coauthors of the GIMP, proved that open-source software could compete with top-of-the-line proprietary applications.

The impetus for creating the Unix-based image-manipulation program was partly necessity, Mattis recalls. "I wanted to make a Web page at the time, and I couldn't," says Mattis. "It was that simple."

But the project was anything but easy. It took the pair about two years. In the middle of the effort, Mattis decided he needed a better set of user interface software tools. So he wrote the GTK program, which in turn became a vital piece of code for building GNOME, one of the leading contenders for the role of a user-friendly desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. Both the GIMP and GTK are now included in the standard versions of the Linux-based operating system distributed by Red Hat, TurboLinux and other major Linux providers.

By the late '90s, university pressure on the XCF to produce or perish lessened. But the tough-love atmosphere continued. "Even if you did the greatest work you've ever done, people still would point out why it sucked," says Kimball, who co-founded a Web portal-building firm called Wego with another XCFer.

XCFer Alice Zheng says the critical culture didn't repel potential members. Instead, the harsh feedback helped feed the club's coding quality, just as it had in earlier years. "Having an environment where you get direct feedback is important, because you don't get that anywhere else" says Zheng, who is now getting her Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at Berkeley.

Zheng, Kimball, Mattis and others would spend as much as 80 percent of their time in the XCF office. And they came to see themselves as an elite breed apart.

"It had the highest concentration of motivated and capable individuals that I've ever seen," Zheng says.

Excessive self-esteem? Perhaps. But XCFers from that era have an impressive track record. Of even greater significance, though, may be the role Gene Kan and Kimball have played in the success of file sharing software Gnutella. Gnutella, briefly released by AOL subsidiary NullSoft this spring and then yanked by corporate higher-ups, has been reverse-engineered by open-source programmers and disseminated throughout the Internet. As a potential example of the future of the Net -- distributed file-sharing that depends on no central server for its operation -- Gnutella could be hugely influential.

Kimball and Kan wrote a version of Gnutella for Unix. They also maintain a major Gnutella Web site and Kan has served as the primary spokesman for the software. From this bully pulpit, Kan has called Gnutella a defense against excessive government or corporate censorship.

"We're headed toward a world where corporations control our lives -- control the flow of ideas and the freedom to think," he says.

Kan's statement provides a link between two strands of Berkeley history over the past four decades: free-speech political activism and computer programming advances. Of course, the XCF isn't as famous as Mario Savio's Free Speechers or Bill Joy's BSD Unix programmers. But the plucky student-run group does draw accolades from those who know its work.

Chris DiBona, the "Linux community evangelist" for VA Linux Systems and head of the Silicon Valley Linux Users' Group, applauds both the GIMP and GTK. "Those are phenomenal projects with really great thinking behind them," he says. DiBono estimates that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies of the programs are in circulation.

XCF members "are a legend," says Christos Papadimitriou, who was acting chairman of Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer sciences department earlier this year. "They are forward-looking, activist and fiercely independent."

On the other hand, the XCF's high opinion of itself can irk some students in the computer science department.

"There's the XCF's pride," says Daniel Silverstein, of the broader Computer Science Undergraduate Association. "There's also, 'What's the XCF been doing since the GIMP?'"

Not much, admits current XCFer Eric Wagner. In recent years, the club has focused on more personal projects, often having to do with hardware. Members built a special MP3 player used during a Las Vegas road trip and also hacked into the XCF office climate-control system.

Wagner will be the only XCFer next year and is busy recruiting. That's hard to do, though. Wagner says one problem is the ease with which student coders can do all their programming work online from home. And those hardcore Berkeley computer heads wanting to share programming tricks can now turn to the Web for a ready-made community. Sourceforge.net, for example, is home to more than 81,000 programmers working on 11,000 projects. Those who turn to Sourceforge can join or launch software projects small and large.

This type of online collaboration, of course, owes indirectly to XCF accomplishments: building trust in the Net by killing the Internet worm and reinforcing enthusiasm for the free-software movement with GTK, the GIMP and Gnutella. Yet it's quite possible the XCF's success may lead to its extinction. Still, Wagner is determined to preserve the club.

"This has such a history," says the 20-year-old. "It'd be a shame if it dies just because I didn't work hard enough."

Whatever happens next in the annals of the XCF, Lapsley looks back on his now-grown baby with a father's satisfaction. Currently the vice president of engineering of a Berkeley biometrics technology firm, the 34-year-old says he's glad the XCF has produced valuable open-source software and improved people's lives along the way.

He got a particular kick from discovering that GIMP files end in the letters ".xcf." "It made me so proud," he says. "That's really cool."

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