Jamie Zawinski
The facts provided here are quite thin — there is no single named work, no education record, no career milestones, no named influences or successors, and no information about whether Zawinski is living or deceased. Following the evidence lock, I can only write what the facts directly support, which means the structural recipe cannot be fully executed (no single defining work exists in the facts to open with, and no named influence or successor exists to close on). I will write a short, honest biography anchored strictly to what is stated.
Jamie Zawinski is an American programmer, computer scientist, engineer, businessperson, and blogger who was born on November 3, 1968, in Pittsburgh. A citizen of the United States, he works primarily in the English language and has maintained a public presence through his writing online.
Beyond his technical roles as a programmer and engineer, Zawinski has also engaged with the business side of the technology world and has contributed commentary and writing through blogging. The facts available describe a person whose professional identity spans both the practical craft of software engineering and the broader discourse of computing, though the specific projects, publications, or ventures associated with his career are not detailed in the available record.
No specific works, collaborators, or successor figures are documented in the available facts, so this biography reflects only what can be confirmed: Zawinski is a Pittsburgh-born American who has worked across programming, engineering, computer science, business, and blogging throughout his career.
Quotes by Jamie Zawinski
On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn’t necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense.
Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that’s the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don’t have to run your OS, and you don’t have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!
You can always affect things – so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won’t be the same, but it might be something else you also like.
Any time someone says “that’s it, I’m leaving” I ask them whether they’d prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they’re usually worse in the protectorates.
Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.
You can’t take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of “open source,” and have everything magically work out.
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It’s a great hacker’s tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.