Beaujolais Mozillur Dot Part-ay Number Something dot Oh!

by Mr. Bad

2002-05-08 05:12:47

Software Jihad

So, it's finally happening again! The super-best fantastic Free Software party of history, long SUPPRESSED by its AOL-Time/Warner OVERLORDS, is now back and better than ever! In the DNA Lounge! In San Francisco! Beaujo to your cujo! I don't even know what that means, but I just made it up because I'm all excited and hyperventilating!

So, Mozillur dot Party One point Oh was this big crazy X-travaganza in the heart of Multimedia Gulch -- remember The Gulch? Haw! -- way back when, in 1998, when the Netscape browser code was first released under a Free Software license. It was insane and great!

I think I may count it as the high-water mark of that special era that was the mid-nineties in San Francisco. We were WINNING, dammit! Like a dreadnought of inevitability, COOL IDEAS and WEB PEOPLE were going to bulldoze old and boring and wrong. No one would stand in our way! Hell, man, NETSCAPE was OPEN SOURCE now! "The World Turned Upside-down" indeed!

And the crazy thing is that it was a DAMN GOOD PARTY. Seriously, I would not hype a stupid trashy rugby-shirt CORPORATE HOOHAW, but Mozillur dot Party was big fun! I got real drunk and spit up in an alley. Or maybe that was Mozillur dot Party Two point Oh. I can't remember! Because they were both real super-good parties! See here and here and what-the-fuck just go look around here for things labelled "Mozilla". Or "Mozillur". Or something.

Anyways, Mozilla Dot Partay One dot Oh was like the Last Waltz of when Cool People ruled the Web. By the time M dot P 2 dot Oh came around the next year, it was the Dot Com era, and everything was upsidedown and changed and bad. JWZ left AOL that year, and everyone said it was the death knell for Mozillur, and they were damn well right! Mozillur is a horrible piece of XML-laden CRAPPO now - a big fat resource pig. I hate it! But I use it all the time.

Do I have a point here? No, not really. There was a 3.0, and then the Party Bureau at AOL went all black and sent out no transmissions, and we had a Mozilla Not Party in SF. Serious! It was good, too. Pigdog put it on. I'm surprised you weren't there.

And now it's 2002, and the whole thing just seems like a moot point, but they're having a party anyhow to announce the release of Mozillur 1.0. Jamie Zawienski is going to be hosting the party at his fabulous Playboy-Mansionesque DNA Lounge in San Francisco, which is actually a pretty damn good venue.

They're calling it the Mozilla 1.0 Release Party, rather than Mozilla dot Party One point Oh, see, which, like, there's some sense in that, I guess. Maybe it's the start of another era that Mozilla dot Party One point Oh was an end of. I dunno. I'm 4500 miles away from San Francisco, and I don't think there's any chance I would go to this. But if you go, and you see funky people in Spock Mountain Research Labs labcoats, buy them a goddamned drink!

Check it out yourself

jared@pigdog.org