looking for the Silicon Valley experience

They arrive with one suit case in hand

when they head south on the 101.

Hoping to see it this place they've heard about

and its freeways, and its office parks

and its strip malls, and

it looks like every place they've ever been

end up wondering where are they come,

why did they come here,

what was that brought them

Code itself is the underlying thing that makes computers work

Why is it important to the world, it's because

it's the blood of the organism, that's our culture now,

it makes everything go

Technology has become a God of our society now

I mean I think that its--people stand in awe of it

and stand in awe of the people that make it

There's a sense that software is a kind of new frontier

it's you know it's the old gold rush metaphor

the California gold rush all over again

It's the kind of Hollywood of the Twenties.

This very small set of people is really defining

how our world's gonna be like

I mean you know the computer becoming ubiquitous

and the way we interact with the world

more and more mediated through the computer

is this very small group of people

defining what that world's gonna be like.

Netscape !

everywhere !

team !

fight !

Less than three years ago

a small team of engineers at Netscape Communications

created software that made surfing the Internet easy

and in the process change the face of computing

On this day however, the company is in big trouble

driven to the ground by its rival and software colossus Microsoft

Only a radical strategy will help save it.

"Let's hear a loud Mozilla !"

Mozilla ! Mozilla ! Mozilla !

Netscape is giving away its source code

to programmers outside the company

The source code is the secret formula for browsing the web

The code is named Mozilla and if widely adapted

it will make Netscape's code the Internet standard

drawing users to its other products

and restoring the company's sagging fortunes.

Our story focuses on team of engineers

who will come together in this building

Over the course of the next year

they will turn their lives inside-out to create Mozilla

and battle a giant competitor to save their company

and shape the future of computing.

Right now we have a problem with the work looks like it can't possibly be done

for the date we announced

so were just trying to

drill down on how doomed we are

and sometimes the only way to do that is

to get everybody in the room and stare each other in the eyes.

We said were giving you Netscape Communicator on 3/31

so if were not giving them Netscape Communicator on 3/31

we need a way to address that.

The goal is to get Mozilla to developpers by March 31th

a few shorts weeks from now

it is one of the most ambitious schedules in the company history.

- It's a joke

- I think we have been very exclusive

Michael Toy one of Netscape's first employees

heads the team that will prepare Mozilla for public release.

We're probably doomed, we're probably gonna fail

Microsoft is probably gonna squish us like bug anyway

but just cause were doomed doesn't mean

you know we cant get up in the morning and do work

All rise

the honorable Michael Toy presiding.

I'm pretty flip with my kids about what I do.

What do you do at work dad? Oh I don't know I sit in meetings

and feel depressed and I read e-mail.

Oh oh you got me !

But they think my office is the greatest place in the world though

It's like "Oh were going to your office ?"

"Oh yeah yippie I love going to your office !"

They play with the guns and there is free soda

and there is the giant balls

basically I work at Disneyland as far as they're concerned.

I talk about marathon versus sprint.

The hard part is to run with significant intensity the whole way

knowing that if you ever start walking

you're not going to make it and just keep the end in sight

and know that there's this urgency.

Jim Roskind an expert on software security

is brought in to enforce rigorous standards of engineering precision.

Imagine if you had a project

where you felt doom was imminent

all the different players wondering

are they pushed beyond their level

can they think of way of running faster,

can anyone help them ?

So there's lot of tension

and anxiety over making the schedule.

Jamie Zawinski, free source code evangelist

will enlist outside developers to Netscape's cause.

The free source thing is trying to change the rules, right.

There are people who have the free software religion,

the one thing they have in common is they're all hackers

they're all like writing code

so you hoping to tap in to all of those smart people

and get something from them, you know, so that everyone benefits..

I talk about 2 millions and 2 half millions lines of code

and everyone of them has to be gone over

carefully and in some cases twice.

With hundreds of engineers converging on Mozilla,

with new code to enable its release,

Tara Hernandez make sure

that their changes do not crash Mozilla

and brings everyones work to a halt.

This is how we keep track

of all the changes that are going in.

Green is good.

Lot of changes going on right here,

and wham, the build all died.

Ok, alright, bye.

We're doomed.

Some of the worst crashes are reserved for Scott Collins

a veteran code writer who stands by

for late night troubleshooting.

I've been here for about

I don't know, 60 hours or so.

Writing software is different from

selling real estate.

Selling real estate you sell the people

the people sleep at night.

When they go to sleep you have to stop selling real estate

Computers never sleep.

You can see my cube is decked out a little bit better than

all the people's.

I have a nice couch

little mattress under there I can sleep in

artwork from my children

I have control the light switches.

This is what I'd like to get if my wife truly love me

she'd let me have one.

Life is good.

Ok

Bug count.

Alright, there are a ton of bugs on here that

people just aren't doing anything about.

To give away its code

Netscape engineers must make thousands of bug fixes

Often minute changes that will allow the code

to be used by outside developpers.

Jeff Weinstein has, one, two,

three, four, five, six,

seven, eight, nine, ten,

eleven, twelve, thirteen.

One bug hidden in the mass of code

can stop everyone else's work

and can threaten the ship date.

I need someone to page Jeff Weinstein

and get him to call 2024.

Even a team of twenty people building a car

it's easy to step back fourty feet and look and go

"Hold it, that guy has not putting on the wheel"

You have fourty programmers working

they all come to you with code, a gigantic morass

of little details piled up on a disc

usually can even see the pieces whether they're doing it correctly

You have to assemble it into a whole

and then see if the whole works

and then you're not even sure of who gave you the bad bits.

That would be bad. Let's go downstairs, come on!

You're talking about a recipe.

Who gave you the bad flour.

Someone went out to grind flour,

and they had to all be exactly

the right size chunks of flour.

Someone else made chocolate chips,

they all had to be exactly the right size chunks.

You can't figure it out until you put it all together

you hand it out, and people go.

"I don't like the way this tastes"

And now you have to wonder,

with all these details coming together

which was the problem

who's causing the problem, how can you fix it?

You've got to ship on a certain time.

And now you have all this people,

you have the clock ticking and it gets pretty intense.

Since Netscape began

the amount of code making up Mozilla

has increased by a factor of 30.

The job of programming and debugging it

rests upon a precarious balance of science and art.

They talk about what they do as if

it was a kind of alchemy, a kind of wizardry.

It does remind me of athletics in that way.

You know why is someone a good baseball hitter?

Often the hitters themselves can't really explain it.

And often the best software people

cannot themselves understand why they're so good at it.

But I think make a great programmer is being raised techie.

My particular team at Netscape, I think we all grew up techie

We all grew up with computers around us somewhere,

so that we were exposed to them before we became

adults, if any of us are really adults

Jim is the most grownup of us.

A lot of my childhood from roughly age 6 to age 17

was around here.

Life was just a nightmare, this is a very, very scary place

the two school wasn't too bad.

Ah, but it meant it

you'd get to work on puzzles and problems.

All of the puzzling is math,

and that puzzling is the exact same feeling

the exact same problem that you go through

when you're programming.

When I was young it'd be building with erector sets and Lego

now the structures that you build are in software.

My mom is a first class geek too.

And so I have a unique experience of being able to talk

shop with my mom, cuz' she's a director of

really important stuff at Sun.

At Netscape one of the code words for is the average person

who is going to be able to use this software is,

"Well can my mom use it?"

Yeah, my mom can use it.

My mom can write optimizing compilers.

By the time I was 12 years old I was making 50 bucks an hour

programming computers.

People say what should I be should I grow up to be a...

I say computer programmer.

The thing about that makes it a youth culture

is one's capacity to throw one's entire life on the line

with these firms

Entire life commitment meaning

24-7-365 work commitment.

It's throwing yourself into a thing

where you don't know if that job

is going to be around soon.

There's no stability in here.

So the very kind of weird irony

is that very people who are inventing the future

can't see their own future.

This is a monk-life existence

there are very few women in these societies.

These are male societies,

they are secret societies,

they function very much like the Masons

or some street gang.