Salon on JWZ/Emacs/Mozilla/AOL and Nightclubs

genehckr writes "Salon has an article about how JWZ has been spending his time since leaving Netscape/AOL/Mozilla -- he's working on buying a nightclub in San Francisco. The article also delves into JWZ's personality, and some of the history behind the JWZ/RMS Lucid Emacs/emacs split -- an interesting read. " Ok, I put it under the Mozilla icon because I don't have a 'San Francisco Nightclub Icon'. Interesting article covering stuff that we don't usually see around here.

Comments

jwz == altruistic nerd?

[wavelet]

Maybe altruistic is a bit too generous, but following jwz for a while it seems like he is very true to himself. Much like Linus he seems somewhat unchanged by his fame and money. Ok so he's got more money. His arrogance today seems to be no more than his arrogance several years back.

Perhaps it's the malleability of code that makes some programmers, especially free software programmers, so optimistic that they can fix things, that problems are solvable, that a solution is always waiting to be found. Software can be fixed. Programmers live in a world where reality can be shaped according to their will -- all they have to do is write another line of code.

A fairly interesting insite into why hackers are so powerful. Now only do they think they can fix things... in many instances they actually do. All the hub-bub about the freedom on information, ie the state of "the net" is all about hackers knowing they can change things. Shows like Triumph of the Nerds attempts to document this phenomenon. It also seems to celebrate the power and influence of nerddom as if nerds have something to prove.

jwz icon

[acb]

What about the spinning-compass easter egg Netscape showed when pointed at jwz's page? Should be nicely obscure.

Re:The Problem With Enforced Disassembly

[kinesis]

Compare San Francisco's night life to Manhattan's. It's pathetic.

These New Money people move into the city so they can experience it's culture and then they kill it. Well, move the fuck out.

It's the young crowd that's largely responsible for giving a city its personality. If you take away the outlets for the hipsters, they're going to stop moving in and start moving out. A San Francisco where every district feels like Pacific Heights is not a San Francisco people will be happy with.

The party crowd can vote, Willie. Take care of us.

JWZ Chose Well

[ewhac]

I'm not what you'd call a club maven, but of all the SOMA clubs I've been to, DNA Lounge was one of the nicest. I was there for Club Slick one year, and was very favorably impressed.

Frankly, I have very limited sympathy for the new area residents. There was a reason their precious, quaint SF loft was (relatively) affordable. They knew there was an all-hours club nearby when they bought the place; why are they suddenly acting all surprised?

I've had the same dream as JWZ, except with me, it was a coffee shop up in Marin. I lacked the money and business acumen to realize it. So I'm pleased to see JWZ pursuing the same goal: Preserving what he thinks is important.

Schwab

Re:Lucid Emacs and Open Source and Stallman

[cburley]

The original author of Emacs was James Gosling.

Gosling might have been the original author of a particular variant of Emacs, but he did not write the original Emacs.

Richard M. Stallman wrote the original Emacs, in MIT TECO, for use on MIT's ITS operating system. I know, because I was probably one of the first few people to try it out. (Happened to be hacking in the AI building one night when I saw his "post" about this new set of Editor MACroS. Tried it, thought it was cute, but stuck with TECO.)

He turned the code over to a software publisher called Unipress Software way back in the UUCP-only era (circa 1985). They sold distributions and full source distributions to tons of companies, gov orgs, and universities. They made flenty of feature enhancements, re-writes, etc. They paid Gosling a nice royalty for every sale.

At some point Stallman picked up one of the source distributions and made some modifications. They were good modifications, IMHO. Some of them were lame (e.g.- simply removing the Copyright tags). And then he started giving it away for free.

It's possible, from a historical point of view, that you're right. But I'd like to see a more definitive account from someone I trust -- someone who doesn't think Gosling wrote the original Emacs, for example.

This is the founder of the Free Software Foundation. I believe at some point he did in-fact completely re-write the code. But this was far more recent than you'd expect.

I recall hearing about some important rewriting of a disputed module (or set thereof) back in the late '80s or early '90s. The dispute might have been over whether RMS had actually copied from UniPress Emacs vs. an earlier (free?) Gosling Emacs version, the latter having been claimed to be "free" by some. (Perhaps Gosling once told, or was believed to have told, RMS or someone that it was okay for RMS to copy from his Emacs, since RMS invented it, after all, and this "tale" didn't get properly communicated through the UniPress aquisition. I'm really just speculating here, based on some probably-shaky memories of third-plus-hand info. I don't recall ever actually discussing these issues with RMS myself, because it's never seemed important enough to do so.)

So I disagree entirely with your implicit assertion that RMS and Project GNU got started by illegally copying a proprietary product and then rewriting it to avoid legal hassles, even though some aspects of your story might have elements of truth to it.

I've found RMS to be many things, but unprincipled about copying other peoples' software without permission is not one of them. And the sort of dispute I think occurred vis-a-vis Gosling's Emacs is exactly the sort of thing that one could reasonably agree could occur without either Gosling or RMS having knowingly done anything wrong, given the ad-hoc nature of communications over such matters (like copying software) back in those days.

One thing for sure: without RMS, there'd have been no Gosling Emacs and no UniPress Emacs. But without Gosling Emacs and without UniPress Emacs, there'd have still been a GNU Emacs, for the same reason GNU CC was created: because it was so important to have one, it had to be done ASAP, one way or the other.

(FWIW, ISTR that UniPress Emacs was pretty decent, in terms of speed on a VAX/VMS system, back when I demoed it circa 1986, compared to some other commercial variant -- CCA Emacs? -- and I think we chose UniPress as a result, despite what I recall was a non-full-featured extension facility. It was the second Emacs environment with which I became fairly familiar, the first being Pr1me's Emacs. I haven't yet gotten familiar with GNU Emacs to the same degree, despite having used it for some 10 years now.)