Netscape Documentary

Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

Tone

This is an example of late afternoon sun at Netscape Notice that we are facing north with

the camera and to the west is the sun

Whats the life of code writer like

Its adventure 24 hours Its you know blood and guts Urn alot of it is uh its lot like

writing think prose Its like here are the

things wanted to
say and have to work out

the best
way to say them so that people or in this case the compiler will understand Urn

theres sort of theres

guess two schools of though about it One is that
programming is

is and engineering discipline and the other is that its an art And think both theres an

element of truth in both Because it is

highly technical but and alot of it is just raw

creativity Urn sort of think that as like the difference between hackers and software

engineers

Um sol dont know my life is like work from home lot which dont know works

for me lot of people have trouble home

working at because they just have trouble

focusing unless there are work people around but find it much
actually easier to

concentrate when Im alone Urn and Ive been you know lucky enough to
get in

position where can work from home and work for

company that lets me do that Urn
most aren that
people lucky So generally Ill sort of fall out of bed around like 10

oclock or noon stumble downstairs and read

my e-rnail and some hours later
get dressed

and take shower and go out for lunch or you know whatever Urn tend to work lot at

night Urn just you know whenever In this line

really of work lot of it is just meeting

the deadlines shipping product doing the work you need to do no one really cares much

when you do
\N1bout it at long as you know you have decent relationship with your

and theyre confident that

/nanager you are Thats
actually doing your job all there is

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

Urn lately Ive been going in to the office just about every day because you know were

starting new project The whole Mozilla.org thing means that urn have to interact with

lot of different people Theres lot of stuff to work out and lot that sort of goes faster

when you just get all the people in the same room and get in eachothers faces

Is there obviously you prefer to write code at home and presumably that

means relative peace and quiet where youre left..

Most of it mean the really big reason is mostly just that hate the commute Urn and

you knowetscape is down in Mountain View which is just total suburban hell and if

had to live there Id kill myself Urn like San Francisco lot before here lived in

Berkeley and you know same kind of deal its nice place to live and dont think

Mountain View is which means that it takes me an hour to get to work and an hour back

And you know dont have to do it

during rush hour so its not that bad but still thats

two hours out of my life each day that could be doing something else Working or

reading book or going to movie or you know whatever So urn when you work at

hornea ou do tend solaed know and theres lot of stuff about like the
you

culture and stuff that you end up not being as involved in you know thats definite

drawback which is why is why you know under normal circumstances usually go in in

you know once week or one every two weeks just to talk to people you know because

the people work with are my friends too like to see them

-When we were filming Michael Toys first meeting you were on the

phone why was that just cause he wanted you patched in to the meeting

that day

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Netscape Documentary
interview
Tape 29 Jamie
Zawiriski

for me to be at but for some reason

was meeting that you know it was good
Yeah that

was Maybe had

be there Im not sure why dont remember why that
couldnt

found out about the

else that planned to do in the city or maybe just
something already

because people
down there time which happens lot
too late to go or to make it in
meeting

at the last minute

tend to announce meetings

Would care to
exalted position at Netscape you
You seem to have an

why that might or might not be

explain

time andum dont know Im

Um...well dont know Ive been there long

lot of code so
Urn you know Ive written
obnoxious peopk know who am also

when someone the company and starts reading the code they see my
you know joins

of the pieces of that

name lot because Ive touched lot

You know one thing thing were getting

reflection.

really complicated code

about the of producing
-Lets talk challenges

make meal cooked

about that dozen chefs doesnt the get
Well one of the clichØs is urn

think more liky to get quality program

faster if you have
any faster youre actually

mean the most people you want to

small group of people would think that the optimal

order of dozen And thats

have on of any kind would be on the
working project

with their hands in the

it Urn right now at Netscape theres just so many people
pushing

the program
code that its just apotthnatiomnightmaw Urn just getting getting

Thats what Tara and her team do and

on day to day basis is an enormous job
compile

who do nothing but that Its just its mess Urn and its
thats what people people

of half
that we have at Netscape that weve been trying
to fix sort
one of the big problems

which that the big the programs got big theres

long time company
is got
heartedly for

code grew
other that are off to the side and urn the way the
all this desire for these pieces

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 Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

it
just happens that urn its not separated as well as it should be Urn and this is one of

the things that we have to fix

now we have no choice Urn

reflection

So right now were in situation where we have too rnany out of the
people working same

piece of code And you know were about to have that problem in spades right releasing

this to the net right So now is the time when we cant put it off any longer we have to

address it Its one of the first things we have to do Is separate out separate the code out

so that you cant have mean at the end of the day you have this monolithic this

enorrnous called
prograrn Communicator or whatever that includes checker and
spell

includes you know mail rigger and address book that talks to all these different protocols

and what not urn but you have to anange so that the people doing each of those

components can be worhng in small team And dont like this group over here doesnt

bring the whole thing to halt Which

grinding is kind of the situation were in right now

Is there anyway to eliminate that from the environment

development

Thats really just you know the

engineering side of things Theres managing large

group of people and doing design up front that puts that structure in and accept you know
we didnt have the do
opportunity to that because we had five major releases in three and

half years Thats just insanely fast for software development Urn we didnt have time to

the release
first release 1.0 and 1.1 and 2.0 were so radically
just different from

eachother When we were writing 1.0 we didnt know that

thing was going to have

nanator you know or that it was going to turn into an HTML editor And design

decisions would have been made differently And urn in an ideal world youd able to

take the time and be and redesign

leisurely things but you know were on the bleeding

eL edge so we dont get to do that

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

Can you keep up this pace of innovation as you get bigger

dont know

Urn think we can continue going that fast but not if the
company keeps getting bigger

But you know the free source thing is trying to change the rule right rnean big part

of the problem with you know the reason that we couldnt stop and redesign things and

make it all nice and modular at first was we didnt have enough people to do it we couldn

thes.oifcan
likTp

coordinate
the other stuff

that effort
we were doing

right you know all

And

good things
urn if we have you know

are possible
another

When you say make it more will it simply in more perfect world what

will happen to the code when it

goes out into the world

Urn its hard to say you know its loose fact territory Urn program of this size has

never been dropped wholesale onto the Net So and there have been prograrns this big

that have been free software but they started out small And so the direction that they went

was largely influenced by the free software community And here weve got this

commercial that had and

program very different set of goals relative compared to the

size of the people on Net small number

the relative of people rnaking the decisions And

now you know this new group of people is going to be revising all of those Urn but you

know Im really confident really think its gonna be its gonna be great thing

How did the decision take us back to December when somebody decided

this had to happen

Well wasnt really wasnt really involved in the decision to release the source It took

me by surprise read the press release like everyone else and was like Oh well thats

really interesting

I0

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 JamieZawinski interview

Urn the way it started think was urn back when we were writing lot of code in Java

we were gonna be distributing for largely within Java one of the things one of the

interesting things about Java is that urn part

of the sort of an accidental side effect of the

Cross Platforrn nature of Java is that its it

cornpiles down to the Java virtual machine the

byte code And urn that byte code it turns out is easy to turn back into Java code There

are decompilers thatll take you Java class files and turn thern back into Java source files

And urn the surprising part is they actually do it

pretty well Which is sort of just inherent

in the way the thing is designed Um which rneans that if youre shipping Java

prograrn shipping Java prograrn rneans shipping class files And if someone can take

those class and back into\turce

files turn it
youve just shipped source So what

happened was lot of people realized this and we suddenly really concerned about it

because obviously you cant give away source how are we going to solve this enormous

problern They we in tizzy about it So you know and few other people were

commenting that you know theres nothing really wing with shipping source you wan

work in that world because what companies sell is not executables whole lot of
they sell

stuff of which executables is Most of what and

cornponent they sell is brand belief

that the
support is there and theres going to be next version its not just something

youve picked up off the street Urn so the source is just srnall
part
of it And urn

didnt expect to take that because wasnt

really anyone seriously it
just battle that

thouglltthere was any chance of winning inside commercial organization But urn Frank

Packer whose one of the uh hes sales he

guy sells to governrnent accounts just loved

the idea And so he wrote out this long document like some sort of sales
prospectusIike

how he saw things working if we would the source too And you know he
give away

shopped that around to lot of people and got lot of support for it and urn
apparently

when the press release went out saying were the source
giving away it
surprised hirn too

Urn that was that And since then you know when the source went out when the

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 Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

announcement was made that the source was going out this was like week after the

layoffs and everyone was still kind of shell shocked and trying to figure out you know

what they were going to do My project had just been canceled and none of the other

projects that were being offered looked like any fun and urn so you know started

talking to people about Mozilla.org well about how we were going to manage giving

away the source and how you know the way to do it was to model other free software

projects which meant that an organization like Mozilla.org would end up existing and it

was in our best interest to createit ancl4ake sure it worked rather than just kind of like

hoping right Urn when you give birth to child you dont just hope they learn the

language you try to steer them in the

right direction

Describe how...inside the walls of Netscape

its an
tWell enormgroup olpeople and theyre really diverse Urn theres there are

in universities there
people are people doing it in their
spare time there are people who

you know have the free software religion who spend an awful lot of time on it and

thinking about political issues its just you know its hard to characterize them The one

thing they have in common theyre hackers Theyre So

writing code
is all all like
you

know hoping to tap

in to all of those smart people and get something from them so that

one benefits.. Thats the

way it has to work lot of people from like the corporate

mechanism side of things know

you Netscape has to look at it
as you know whats in it

for the and why

company why is the
company doing this is the fact that the companys

doing this not going to make the shareholders sue us But its aneotiation.right it has to

be of benefit to everybody or no ones going to play

...what did that say did that sort of into whole

spin Netscape different

experience How much does money influence development in this world

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

Yeah thjjknow-what youre getting at actually think its few different

think IPO day was one of the strangest expeæenees of my life went to work

early to watch the ticker with everyone else and urn there were the
reporters swarming

parking lot and the Netscape PR people wWingsureyou cant talk to anybody it

could derail the whole thing And then um there was lot of waiting because the market

opened and there was no word on Netscape and apparently it

got the price got talked up

before ever was offered sale was of us had ever

it for It just it
was crazy Urn none

experienced or heard of anything like that thats true in because its an

guess general

event hadnt before

right it
happened Urn you know in sorne ways it was it
means

we did something right So it was great Urn as to whether that was bad for the company

how could it be Thats the goal thats what companys do thats where theyre
tryffif.\

get Urn Netscape just did it lot faster and smarter Urn if urn going to work for start

up is there are two ways to loose thats pretty rnuch what it cornes down to Either the

company runs out of money or you know if the

companys going down running out of

money um you cant work on interesting things because you have to do whatever it takes

to make payroll this quarter Urn are because

people depressed theyre not getting to work

on fun things Theres layoff their friends down and eventually

are gone everyones

the
company goes out of business Which is awful its ugly Ive seen it
times
couple

and you dont want to be there The other side of the fence is you know you do start up

and youve got bunch of really smart and

people working together getting along great and

you something really cool and it succeeds beyond your wildest dreams and then the

company turns into big company And its horrible

place to work And you loose

again Urn most people dont get to experience that kind of losage but um and you

know what am complaining about Im earning lot of money but still as far as personal

enjoyment goes urn its the middle part thats interesting The middle part was fai

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

short at Netscape you know year and half two years most companies most wildly

successful companies that period would have dragged on the better of decade
part

Urn you know had always uh never though would ever work for big company

because that kind of environment doesnt appeal to me in the least Urn and oops

Netscape became one But you know theres still interesting stuff to do mean

Mozilla.org is great and wouldnt be able to be doing project like this anywhere else

But one of the another one of the odd dynamics about and big companies and that
start-ups

whole area is that someone David Williams another Netscape think he said it
guy

best it was urn there are two kinds of people theres the kid of people who want to to
go

work for because want make and then theres

company they to it successful the kind of

people who want to go work for successful And those two completely
company are

different mindsets and at some point you stop getting the first kind and you start getting

the second kind And the ff0 is definitely one of those places where people are like

you it on the radar of people who are looking for the successful rather than for the

interesting company

Interesting

You were
point.-

talking about small teams

.7
being the core of software development
-/
how do companies innovate constantly

Yeah you ask ..how do big companies innovate my feeling is that as rule cojnpnjs

dottt Innovate Um they when company gets to be above certain size as its just

process its mechanism for

making And innovation one possible way of
money is

doing that but its risky way So big companies dont do that Um you know

Microsoft actually doesnt do very much They buy companies They wait until someone

has done something interesting and then they acquire them and then they milk it for all its

worth dont mean to pick on Microsoft because lots of companies do that its just
the\

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview

normal way of doing business Urn innovations have corne out of big companies like the

Macintosh Apple was already pretty big at that point and they way they did it as

understand it
was grabbed small group of people on the order of 20 put them in roorn

and they came up with new product Right so think HP does this kind of thing all the

time They call it internal

start-ups where theyll take and theyll give lot of
group it

autonomy and theyll do sornething Urn and so basically its just giving independencejo_

smaller groups to go and be creative is irnportant Its kind of an odd thing when it

comes to stock options and stuff because and this is to sound funny Corning from
going

me or coming from most people at Netscape butstock options area com its canot

thing its like oh well if youll give up your one and only youth rnaybe someday youll

make rnoney urn Ive known so rnany who have gambled

right..its people on start-up

and got nothing You know its just stupid tax

like its
lottery lottery ticket Urn

happened to win that paicular lottery so uh Iguess dont have lot of credibility there

but it is rnotivater you know people buy the dream that If you do sornething great

youll be rewarded for it Urn and so big companies have hard tirne rnotivating people

that because dont have

way they just the ability to give those kinds of rewards Urn also

lot of people probably dont realize that um how much more there
just is to it
than than

the product You know you can do

you dont
the best product in the world but if have

people that know how to sell it or if youre not at the right place at the time you
right

know people out in the world dont have like. .the zeitgeist or whatever its not there..

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