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Tone
This is an example of late afternoon sun at Netscape Notice that we are facing north with
Its adventure 24 hours Its you know blood and guts Urn alot of it is uh its lot like
the best
way to say them so that people or in this case the compiler will understand Urn
is and engineering discipline and the other is that its an art And think both theres an
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
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
and take shower and go out for lunch or you know whatever Urn tend to work lot at
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
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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
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
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
because people
down there time which happens lot
too late to go or to make it in
meeting
Would care to
exalted position at Netscape you
You seem to have an
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
the program
code that its just apotthnatiomnightmaw Urn just getting getting
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
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
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
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
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
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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
thouglltthere was any chance of winning inside commercial organization But urn Frank
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
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
doing this not going to make the shareholders sue us But its aneotiation.right it has to
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Netscape Documentary
Tape 29 Jamie Zawinski interview
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
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
money um you cant work on interesting things because you have to do whatever it takes
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
you something really cool and it succeeds beyond your wildest dreams and then the
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
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.-
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
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
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
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
lot of people probably dont realize that um how much more there
just is to it
than than
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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