But Zawinski couldn't make the screening -- he had another commitment, an appearance that same night before the Board of Appeals of the San Francisco Planning Commission. Zawinski may have quit Netscape in a disgusted huff a little less than a year ago, angry at the constant delays plaguing the development of a new version of Navigator, but that doesn't mean the 30-year-old stock-option millionaire has stopped agitating. For the better part of the last year, in the face of concerted resistance from the San Francisco Police Department and to the delight of a picturesque collection of San Francisco's late night entertainment habitues, Zawinski has been struggling to achieve a new dream -- the purchase of the DNA Lounge, a nightclub.

In a scene that simply reeked of wacky San Francisco-ness, Zawinski packed the Board of Appeals hearing with at least 150 fans sporting "Save SF Late Night Culture" stickers -- most of whom were pale-skinned and punk/gothic fashionable enough to qualify for parts as undead extras on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

The Zawinski contingent far outnumbered the handful of residents who came to speak in support of the SFPD's attempt to use the DNA's change of ownership to revoke the DNA's extensive after-hours operating permits.

For the past several years, the South of Market region of San Francisco has been witness to steadily increasing tension between clubs, some residents and the police. As far as club owners and patrons are concerned, the police, acting on behalf of flush and easily annoyed new residents, are engaged in an organized crackdown on the clubs. The dispute over the DNA's after-hours permits is just the latest skirmish.

"San Francisco's clubs are under pressure," says Zawinski, over a sushi lunch in downtown San Francisco's spanking new and ultra-high-tech Sony Metreon building. "And I thought, well, maybe I could try and do something about that. I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but I was doing it because it was something that mattered to me, and not something that could make money, because it's not."

Zawinski's motivation, he says, is akin to one of the key forces that pushes the free-software movement forward. He's "scratching his itch," he says, quoting Eric Raymond, one of the chief evangelists for free software. Programmers appreciate free software -- software in which the underlying source code is freely accessible and modifiable -- in part because oftentimes they simply want to solve a particular problem they face in their daily coding life, or satisfy an urge to add some new, special feature to their software. Enjoying access to the source code allows them to satisfy those needs -- to scratch those itches.

For Zawinski, the current irritation that needs assuaging is what he sees as a marked decline in the number of late-night venues for dancing and live concerts in San Francisco. So Zawinski has set his sights on fixing what he sees as a bug in the city's operating system. This time around, however, he isn't taking advantage of publicly available source code, but instead is capitalizing on the millions of dollars that became the birthright of all early employees of Netscape.

Zawinski's post-Netscape adventures offer an intriguing glimpse as to what the future millionaires of the free software world -- the programmers currently getting fat off of the inflated stock prices of companies like Red Hat and VA Linux -- could decide to do with their riches. If his example is any guide, they may well translate their hacker obsessions into more worldly pursuits. But that's not the only reason to pay attention to Zawinski's late-night crusade.

Part of the backstory to the struggle over the DNA is the increasing gentrification of the South of Market region. The Northern California economy is awash with money -- much of it made from the same dot-com industry that bestowed its largesse on Zawinski. Though not the only factor putting pressure on the nightclubs, the arrival of well-heeled new residents snapping up half-million-dollar condominiums is one reason why the police are cracking down.

To some observers, the showdown is just one more example of how the dot-com economy is reshaping San Francisco, or, to put it more stridently, how the Internet is ruining San Francisco. But the story isn't quite that simple. Jamie Zawinski, as a key Netscape programmer, is as responsible as any single person for delivering the code that made the Internet economy possible. But is he ruining San Francisco? Hardly -- he's attempting to make his own changes, to fight against the tide. And it's not all that quixotic a mission. Zawinski's appearance at the board of appeals was a huge success -- the commissioners unanimously agreed to deny the police their attempt to change the DNA's permits.

The dot-com economy may take away ... but it also giveth.

Among the journalists and hackers who pay attention to the world of free software, Jamie Zawinski is notorious for a whole laundry list of reasons. At Netscape, where for a time he lived inside a camouflage tent spread over his cubicle, and shaved one side of his head while letting hair on the other grow long, Zawinski became an obvious focal point for the hordes of Netscape observers frantic to get a close look at the new world of the Net. Zawinski's legend only grew when, on April 1, exactly one year to the day after helping to organize a huge party to celebrate the public release of the Navigator source code, he quit Netscape, denouncing the entire project, known as "Mozilla," as hopelessly flawed. Ever since, the trade press has labeled Mozilla a free-software failure.

Mention Zawinski's name around Mozilla folks these days and you are likely to get a deep sigh. Zawinski's penchant for telling it like it is, or at least like he thinks it is (a characteristic he shares with many hackers), was a public relations disaster. When I told one consultant who works with Netscape that I'd been having a hard time getting Zawinski to make any further comments about Mozilla, the consultant shrugged his shoulders.

"Hasn't he said enough already?" wondered the consultant.

Some of the South of Market residents who supported the SFPD's attempt to cut back on the DNA's operating hours are also wont to grumble. At the board of appeals hearing, Jim Meko, president of the South of Market Resident's Association (SOMARA), called Zawinski "arrogant" and attacked him for having hired "paid political consultants" to manipulate the local press. At the hearing, other SOMARA members could be seen visibly grimacing in annoyance when Zawinski pointedly made reference to his former Netscape employment while addressing the board -- apparently, it wasn't the first time Zawinski had touted his Netscape lineage.

But in the insular world of free software programmers Zawinski's reputation dates back to long before he ever wrote a single line of code for Netscape. In the early '90s, Zawinski worked at Lucid, a Bay Area start-up that sold high-end programming tools. Zawinski's main contribution to Lucid was the creation of Lucid Emacs, a new version of one of the most popular free software tools then in existence -- the Emacs text editor, originally written by a programmer named Richard Stallman.

Stallman is the founding father of the organized wing of the free software movement. Long before Linux began spreading throughout the computing universe, programmers all over the world used Emacs as their all-purpose workhorse. But there was a problem, according to Lucid. In the early '90s, says Zawinski, the pace of Emacs development had slowed to a near standstill. Lucid management desired a version of Emacs that included a set of features that didn't yet exist. Since the program was free software, that presented no great difficulty -- eventually, Zawinski added most of the necessary features himself.

"Emacs [version number] 19 wasn't done yet," says Zawinski, "so I solved the problem by writing my own version of Emacs 19. One thing led to another, and that didn't work out, so we released our own 'fork' of Emacs 19 -- 'Lucid emacs' which has now been renamed Xemacs. And it's still alive today, because it has features and a design that a lot of people find more compelling than the other Emacs."

One thing led to another ... Buried in that throw-away phrase is an instructive bit of early free software history. Stallman and the Lucid developers did not see eye-to-eye on a series of questions, including who to blame for the delay in Emacs 19, what feature set to include in new versions of Emacs, and, perhaps most importantly, the proposed inclusion of Lucid Emacs in the otherwise proprietary tool kit of programs that Lucid was attempting to sell. The result was the last thing that anybody in the free software community wants to happen to a given project -- a dreaded "fork": the creation of two separate development trees for a single software program.

"Back then we were Satan [to Stallman]," recalls Zawinski. "We were the enemy as far as I can tell. Hopefully he has recalibrated at this point."

Moral of the Emacs story? Programmers can be very stubborn -- Stallman, to be sure, is legendary for his intransigence. But Zawinski is equally difficult to deter -- indeed, it requires a special degree of chutzpah to write an entirely new version of one of the most famous programs in the free software arsenal.

But hardheadedness can be a virtue, even if it does lead to the occasional debilitating fork. The success of the free-software movement owes a lot to arrogant programmers who are dead certain that they are absolutely, unshakably right. Zawinski's willingness to grapple with Stallman was a sign that he would not give up easily when thwarted. And going head to head with Stallman, no doubt, is an experience not all that different from attempting to fight city hall.

The difference, of course, between Zawinski, version 2000, and Zawinski, version 1993, is his access to cash. Hacking code doesn't cost much money, but buying a night club in the over-heated real estate market of San Francisco doesn't come cheap. Just how much he is paying, Zawinski declines to say, other than a shamefaced "probably too much." But money is not the problem.

"I don't remember who it was that I was talking to," recalls Zawinski, "but I was just whining about it [the decline of the late night scene] as usual, and they were like, 'well why don't you buy a club.'"

As we sit together in the Metreon -- a building that is itself a testament to the vast economic and technological changes storming through San Francisco, a building surrounded on almost every side by companies that have built their business models on providing some kind of service via the Internet -- it seems all too fitting to hear Zawinski recall that moment when he realized that he didn't have to just accept the changes in his neighborhood, but could actually do something about them. Even though his actions could be seen as easy target for contradiction, Zawinski is attempting to roll back changes that are in part caused by the same economic upheaval that has given him the wherewithal to fight those changes.

But Zawinski isn't too interested in following down that narrative path. "Change happens," he notes. And unlike some other club owners, Zawinski doesn't want to get drawn into a debate about whether the pressure on the clubs is a result of dot-com yuppies invading the neighborhood. He'd also rather not fixate on how great things used to be.

"Nothing stands still," says Zawinski. "The real question is can you change it? 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."

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.

Zawinski's triumphant appearance before the board of appeals might suggest that he is finding San Francisco politics as amenable to his manipulation as digital ones and zeroes. It does help, of course, to have the cash to buy know-how -- Zawinski concedes that he has hired "many people to advise me on many subjects." It also helps to be on a politically popular side of an issue. The board of appeals commissioners clearly did not want to be accused of killing fun in San Francisco, and several of them grandstanded before the assembled crowd as if they themselves were running for office.

Whether or not the future will be as friendly is, of course, anyone's guess. Zawinski hasn't completed his purchase yet, although it is in escrow and he's confident that "unless something unexpected" happens, he should have no serious roadblocks ahead. There's also no telling if his plans to make the DNA Lounge a "total nerd-space" -- complete with interactive video and live Webcasts for bands -- will be a success. If the police, stung by their defeat at the board of appeals, decide to make Zawinski's life miserable they have the power to do so, no matter how many stock options Zawinski has exercised.

But it's the effort that inspires, not necessarily the outcome. Many free-software programmers believe they can change the world for the better. So far, most have done it by writing software. But there really are no limits to where their passion can be put to work.