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条目由 lgong

Mozilla to Open Office in Taipei

提交: 2011 October 19, 4:19pm HKT 由 lgong

Today we announced (at a press event held in Taipei) that Mozilla will set up shop in Taipei in the coming weeks. We are now recruiting for dozens of highly qualified engineers to work on our exciting B2G and Mobile projects. Come join us!

Three MSFTeers Finally All Out

提交: 2010 October 28, 10:44am HKT 由 lgong

Throughout 2005, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was under tremendous public pressure to counter the insurgency of Google, in terms of both business and talent. The year before Google had just established its presence in Kirkland, practically backyard of Microsoft’s Redmond campus, at the time widely seen as an extraordinarily bold attempt to thumb its nose at the biggest software empire. (Looking back today, that move seems just routine.)

Pressed in an interview published by Business Week on Sept.26, 2005, Ballmer countered forcefully:

“How are we doing in terms of talent? We’ve brought on fantastic new talent. People like Ray Ozzie, I don’t think I need to say more. Gary Flake, who has joined us in the MSN area [and] is really the technical guru and genius behind everything that had happened at Overture, a fantastic addition to our team. Li Gong who has joined our MSN team in China, who was one of the leading architects at Sun Microsystems (SUNW ). These are all people who have joined us in the last six months.”

Well, everyone has seen the report of Ozzie’s recent resignation. (and possibly his swan song memo Dawn of a new day). Not as widely reported is the quiet departure of Flake, whose Live Labs has now been folded into Bing. Myself? I left way back. For completeness, Blake Irving, who hired me to Microsoft, also left not long after and has re-emerged now as Chief Product Officer at Yahoo.

Why we all left? For all its talent pool and financial resources, Microsoft is squarely stuck in the innovator’s dilemma. (Some might say it never had that dilemma. But allow me to use the analogy here.) Despite all that got spent on MSN and Windows Live, the internal forces that go against new innovations and new businesses (and thus new threats to those incumbent senior officers) are simply too powerful. In the past 5 years, MSN’s mandate has oscillated between “be profitable now” and “take market share first”, with each change of direction resulting in massive realignment, reorganization, loss of time and opportunities, and the loss of talented people who want to succeed.

How can MSN/Live/Bing succeed? Assuming that Ballmer does not want to spin it off, then the easiest solution is to fold all of those entirely into the Windows division and make it Steve Sinofsky’s responsibility. That way, maybe all woods will be finally behind the same arrow.

HP Suing Mark Hurd Is Doing Great Favors to Sun Managers at Oracle

提交: 2010 September 8, 5:29pm HKT 由 lgong

HP suing to stop Mark Hurd taking up his post as co-president at Oracle is potentially doing a huge favor to many Sun managers who got absorbed into Oracle. Because once he starts, he will have both the authority (which his predecessor had) and experience of computer systems (which his predecessor did not) to realize that many of them are misfit at Oracle and hasten their departure.

I have heard from reliable sources at/close to Oracle both in the Bay Area and in China that many Oracle folks have been horrified by the ex-Sun managers they have encountered. Basically, the many work-was-so-undemanding-I-can-get-by-on-nothing Sun managers cannot handle the hardnosed, hard elbowed, and frugal culture at Oracle. I am told that they talk empty words at meetings, and they can do nothing except talk. And they think everything is a given, and they do not realize that they have to do any real hard work. I also heard that many laid-off Sun employees who now work at places like IBM find it hard to adjust to demands at work – they say they have never worked so hard in their lives.

Wake up ex-Sun folks! It’s a jungle out there! I can fully understand, having spent 9 years at Sun and later worked at Microsoft (an extremely well-organized military-grade machine) and having working knowledge of how the work environment is at successful firms such as Google – ignore the halo of free lunch and 20% “free” time, it is more like a pressure cooker inside the company and layabouts do not survive long.

Sun’s culture (however it is defined) was both a blessing and a curse for the company. Without the freedom to disagree with and defy higher-ups, things like Java would never have come to life. Sun also had luck – such as buying for about $400M the business from SGI that became the most successful Sun product line, the E10000 series of servers. Sun had a really good run when its products sold themselves. However, when real competition occurred not in the research labs but in terms of operations, Sun could not cope.

We sometimes interview ex-Sun candidates and often they expect (or practically demand) that they have a work environment like the one at Sun. They had it drummed into their heads that Sun’s culture was the reason of its success. They also had it so good (and easy). Like the father character in an old American movie (I wish I can remember the title – the father returned to college after becoming rich and graduated together with his son) who only half-jokingly proclaimed to students at the graduation ceremony – “go back to school, do not venture out, it is a jungle out there”, the world wishes the best to all Sun folks.

My Patents in Oracle vs Google Android Lawsuit!

提交: 2010 August 14, 1:34pm HKT 由 lgong

Everyone by now has seen yesterday’s news that Oracle sued Google over alledged patent infringements relating to Android. I thought “OK, interesting”, and went on with other more pressing tasks at hand. Then I got pinged by someone asking if I was the inventor of 2 of the 7 patents Oracle cited in the lawsuit. I perked up and checked out the complaint itself, and there they are, black ink on white paper, two of my patents listed as No.1 and No.2 in the lawsuit:

#6,125,447: Protection domains to provide security in a computer system (filed Dec 11, 1997, issued Sep 26, 2000)

#6,192,476: Controlling access to a resource (filed Dec 11, 1997, issued Feb 20, 2001)

So I was right that this was interesting — especially when one’s decade old patents have starring roles in such a major corporate battle!

PC/Windows//IE Only in Air China Lounges

提交: 2010 May 11, 11:15pm HKT 由 lgong

I sat at Air China’s departure lounge in Beijing yesterday and as usual tried to get online via Wi-Fi using my iPod touch. Surprised to find that a new system has been installed recently where one *has* to use IE on Windows in order to complete online access. Was told by the staff there that the new system was requested by the public security buaeru in order to better track online activites. And they had already heard quite a few complaints from their customers.

Just another example of the sad state of the Internet in China today.

China Construction Bank Supports Firefox

提交: 2010 February 9, 5:04pm HKT 由 lgong

China Construction Bank (CCB), which is the second largest bank in the world (by market cap) and has the second largest online user base in China, yesterday announced that their personal banking site has solved the web compatibility problem and now supports Firefox. If you read Chinese, you can see CCB’s own announcement at [www.ccb.com] and another report at [bank.baidu.com].

With such a move, CCB became the first major Chinese bank to support Firefox. This is very significant and positive news for Mozilla, because online banking has been the most visible area of web incompatibility problems in China. Until now, all major Chinese banks supported an IE-only solution with ActiveX-based technology, forcing users to use Microsoft Windows/IE and seriously lagging behind their international peers. CCB’s breakthrough represents just the beginning of this ground shift and we fully expect that other banks will follow suit in the coming months.

What Does It Really Mean for Google to Pull Out of China

提交: 2010 January 29, 7:08pm HKT 由 lgong

The recent Google bombshell has certainly been heard around the world. Tons of coverage both in the US and in China — lots of headline echoes, some sensational nonsense, and very little substantial and knowledgeable analysis.

How will this movie play out? Let me spoil the plot here. My executive summary – not insider info from Google, just my own back-of-the-envelope analysis — is that (a) google.cn the service will move offshore, back to where it was. But the move has complicating factors that I will elaborate below; (b) Google will continue to sell their services in mainland China and earn revenue, but this may be negatively impacted if the pullout is not done carefully; (c) Google will keep its R&D center open, but its utility and importance is clearly diminished due to the pullout of the service offerings and the recent hacking incidence.

Now to the nitty-gritty. To understand what it might mean for Google to “pull out of China”, one has to understand what Google has inside China. It has, broadly speaking, three parts. It has the search service, Google.cn; a business team (including a sales force); and a R&D center. What Google the company has put a strong stake in the ground is with regard to its Google.cn service, and given the official statement contained in the bombshell, it does not appear to have any way out of this tangle, except for the service to move offshore, to HK for example. (Or, equivalently in search terms, just offer Google.com straight. The differences between Google.cn and Google.com lie not only in terms of content filtering but also in the other services that Google currently offer only in China – such as music search. (More on these other services later.)

How much will Google lose out by moving Google.cn offshore? You have to understand why Google brought it onshore in the first place. Back at that time, Google.com was reachable from inside China, but subject to sporadic blocking. Google figured that it needed a sufficiently pervasive presence to the Chinese audience. Otherwise, it may become irrelevant in China. Smart idea — look what happened subsequently to Facebook and Twitter – they are irrelevant in China because they are blocked early and thoroughly. Another less well known reason is that many places, especially university campuses, charged (and some still charge) students extra for international internet access. In order to reach these users, Google had to separately negotiate passageways with those gatekeepers (and often pay access fees) to make Google.com reachable from behind those walled gardens. Moreover, a local service would offer a platform to launch China focused services such as music search and download – a feature that has been often credited with cementing Baidu’s early dominance.

Moving the local services offshore now will incur less damage due to the improvement in environments. On the one hand, Google has established itself sufficiently in China such that blocking it completely will be a very testy proposition. For example, lots of university students voiced their strong displeasure during recent blackouts. On the other hand, the access environment has also improved, and internal demand will put enough pressure on the pipe owners to keep Google data flowing.

However, there is potentially serious collateral damage if this move is not done carefully, and this is perhaps why there is even the need for a negotiation in the first place and why it has taken so long to conclude. I am not talking about issues of the company’s social reputation or political standing in China. I am talking about their local services. Consider the music service, which is visible on its Chinese site but not on the US site. An educated guess says that the song rights Google has licensed are probably for mainland use only. Can they still offer these from HK or elsewhere? Ditto about map and other similarly locally acquired services. It is an option, technically, to keep these non-search services inside mainland China; however, they would be decoupled from the core search functions with much diminished user experience. It is hard to imagine that the Google brass in the US would permit such a world’s first exception for the China market. After all, these other services are loss leaders, and without the money making machine called Search, they do not have a reason to exist, corporately speaking.

More critically, Google has search partnerships with the likes of Sina.com, one of the biggest portals in China, and large mobile operators. Now, if the search service is provided from offshore and may be unavailable from time to time, would Sina (as a Nasdaq listed company) continue to rely on Google to power the search feature of its websites? Would Google be able to negotiate safe passages for such deals? Even if so, will these passages be unfiltered? If filtered, who does the filtering? And can the filtered search service still claim to be Google search? Will Google lose customers and revenue because of these factors? The deeper one probes these issues, the more complicated the situation becomes.

What about the much touted R&D center? There has been much fanfare since it was opened. It was said that Google chose to lease a separate but smallish building instead of part of a larger building because in the larger buildings Google would not be permitted to build their famous kitchen, an essential part of the corporate landscape. (Well, corporate security could be another argument, but Google is known to lease space in non-standalone buildings, even here in China.) Google’s salaries topped the previous leader in this market, Microsoft. Every (well, almost every) young and old engineer dreamed to join Google. The swagger was apparent everywhere around the Google building in Tsinghua Science Park.

From the outset, Google US was terribly concerned about information leakage in China. In the early days, Google US employees who travelled to China on business were issued blank, new laptops and were told to keep their own laptops at home. Now with the much rumored inside job, the pressure to close the lid is greater than ever. As a comparison, Sun Microsystems always had its entire intranet open to its China R&D center, except for export controlled technologies such as micro codes and hardware designs. But Oracle never allowed its China R&D center to touch core technology. What will happen now that the two companies have merged?

At the same time, the pullout of the local services also reduced the need for paying sky high salaries to several hundreds of idling engineers. What will they do? They cannot all move to Facebook as their US colleagues did en mass.

Assuming a Google pullout, where does that leave the China search market? Common wisdom says this is a win-win for Baidu, which will have the China market all to itself. That may be, for the short term. In the long term, things may not be as rosy. Not having Google as a distracting target, Baidu could become the focus of those who are unhappy about all the “Internet sins.” But more substantially, the departure of Google could make way for yet another Chinese contender to the search throne. It is often said that Baidu can beat the technologically more superior Google because it can operate the China market more effectively. This is obviously true. But by the same token, Baidu is more vulnerable to another local competitor, which can be as fierce, as shrewd, and as connected as Baidu. Words have it that Tencent – the owner of the dominating IM client QQ and since has expanded successfully into adjacent markets — is coming along with its own search offerings. And Sohu, the well-known portal, was founded to be the Google of China (thus its Chinese name — meaning search fox) and never gave up its search dream. And of course, Bing is always ready to fill any vacuum left by Google. Interesting times? You bet!

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China’s Strange Fixation on IE6

提交: 2010 January 22, 10:21pm HKT 由 lgong

In recent days, a wave of warnings from industry (Google, among others) and governments (from Germany to Australia and others) on the vulnerabilities of IE6 has resulted in a rush for users to download Firefox (www.mozilla.com), the primary alternative browser to IE. On a worldwide level, IE6 (released in 2001) is just one major variant of the IE browser family, and has been steadily replaced by the newer IE7 and IE8.

The scene in China is markedly different. Tons of websites, including commonly used ones, have been constructed and tested to work with IE6 only, without consideration of web standard (W3C), non-IE browsers (Firefox), or non-Windows platforms (Linux). This proliferation of non-standard websites is partly the result of ignorance. Remember the recent Green Dam fiasco? Green Dam was designed to block undesirable websites, but it only works if you access the web with IE. If you use Firefox, Green Dam has no effect. Another reason is financial. Contractors in China who produce websites for a living charge extra if you ask for a website that is W3C compliant or that is friendly to non-IE and non-Windows machines. Since most Chinese users use IE (NetApplications puts Firefox market share in China at 8% at the end of 2009) or an IE-clone such as 360 or Maxthon (more on that later), it seems that there is no reason to pay extra.

As a result, the Internet in China is stuck in an IE6 tar pit. Exhibit A is really ironic. Recall the latest push to have all website owners in China to register? Well, the registration website at MIIT (the ministry in charge) is IE6 only. Without IE6, you cannot file your registration information. (See reportage at [www.donews.com]) It would be amusing to see how MIIT responds to the latest scare over IE6 security problems. And I have not talked much about all the very publicized government push to procure Linux desktop machines for government workers, and the inability of these workers to access many of their own websites.

It is well known that online banking in China is strictly a Windows and IE6 love affair. Even open-source companies such as Sun Microsystems and Red Hat must stock their finance office in Beijing with Windows PCs; otherwise no work can be done through any of the major Chinese banks (see more at [www.zeuux.org]). But this love affair with IE6 goes beyond these and into the arbitrary territory. In October of 2009, the province of Inner Mongolia issued a new directive that exams for accounting certificates will now be conducted entirely paperless. The exam environment is speced out clearly ([www.esnai.com]) – Windows 2000/2003 servers on the backend, and Windows XP Professional and IE6 on the exam PCs. You wonder what sort of accounting exam this is, because it also requires that the PCs are dual-core and have at least 1G memory. The exam system even requires 3721, the most notorious and (widely accepted as the) “original” viral software that helped shape the China Internet industry into its lawless state today.

Now let us return to the topic of IE clones. An IE clone is a software that wraps something around the IE core and declares itself a browser. Some clones offer additional functionalities while others make you question their existence. No matter. There are about 35 IE clones that the local research company iResearch has been tracking. TT (an offshoot of QQ the popular IM software), 360 (a self-claimed “secure browser”), and Maxthon (the original successful IE clone) each take a large share of the browser market. Why so many companies do browsers? For one thing, it is cheap to do an IE clone. It has been estimated that you need about 5 people, roughly the same number of people to start a mobile phone company in southern China (if you buy ready-made components from MTK and just slap a case on it). Furthermore, you can be really lazy if you want – one very notable IE clone here simply appropriated the IE icon for its own use. (As far as I know, Microsoft has not sued.) However, the IE clone world is not all scenic, because the IE core is not open or transparent, so the wrapping around is by trial and error, and often produces problems such as sudden death. Worse, someone else (Microsoft) owns the underbelly and can do unexpected things. When IE8 came out in early 2009, there was a major crisis because the clones stopped working when users upgraded to IE8, and of course thousands of major websites suddenly became useless ([ent.sina.com.cn]). But that has not deterred the clone makers. After the recent Google bombshell, one of the clones shamelessly proclaimed that because IE is insecure people should use their browser instead. Sure looks like that these guys are banking on the ignorance of the Internet users in China.

In most parts of the world, the Internet has helped alleviate ignorance. That has not happened in China, yet; not to a satisfyingly significant degree, at least. This is rather depressing as John Steinbeck wrote in The Pearl – “ignorance leads to subjugation and oppression.”

Firefox China Edition updated today

提交: 2008 December 9, 5:37pm HKT 由 lgong

Tuesday (12/9/2008 Beijing time), we updated the Firefox China Edition to a new version (2008.12).

The main update is that we now provide Google search (as well as Baidu) in Live Margins, and users can configure which default search engine they prefer. In Live Margins (the sidebar at the right side of the browser), if you set Google as default, then Google results will be shown. But at the same time you can simply click a button there to show results from Baidu for the same term(s) you are searching. Vice versa when you set Baidu as default.

We also updated a feature that we call (for lack of a better term) associated search. If you search in the chrome (either from Google, Baidu, or Wikipedia, or whatever), Live Margins will automatically conduct a search also, using the same term(s) you are looking for. So that, suppose you are looking for a definition in Wikipedia, you will also be presented with search results from your favorite engine. We will not duplicate search if the engine you are searching with is the same engine you have set as default in Live Margins. This associated search will occur even if you have “closed” Live Margins (by clicking the g-fox logo at the upper right hand corner). When Live Margins is closed, the g-fox turns into grey color. When an associated search occurs and “new info” is available for viewing, the g-fox blinks for a brief second and turns into bright red color. The associated search ensures that Live Margins always have up to date info on things you are searching for elsewhere in the browser.

The new version can be downloaded from mozillaonline.com or g-fox.cn. We welcome feedback on this forum or at the dedicated forum on g-fox.cn.

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谋智网络今日更新火狐中国版

提交: 2008 December 9, 5:15pm HKT 由 lgong

Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE

我们今日更新了火狐中国版，下载请到火狐中国版官方网站 G-Fox.cn 或其他各大下载网站。

Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE

本次更新主要内容是在“火狐魔镜”中提供用户可定制搜索引擎服务。继上月首次发布火狐中国版后，许多用户反映希望在“火狐魔镜”中增加搜索引擎选项。使用新版本，在呈现谷歌搜索结果的同时，用户可以选择查看百度提供的搜索结果。同样，用户在查看百度搜索结果的时候，可以选择使用谷歌的搜索服务。新版默认搜索引擎设为谷歌，使用“火狐魔镜”后，用户选择的引擎将成为下次搜索的默认引擎。

火狐中国版是我们推出针对中国用户量身定制的区域化版本，携手众多本地顶尖互联网合作伙伴，同时支持包括微软、苹果和Linux三大电脑平台，力图为中国火狐用户和网民带来全新的浏览体验。

恳请大家在 g-fox.cn 的论坛上给我们提出宝贵意见。谢谢。

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Firefox China Edition Released Today

提交: 2008 November 18, 1:53pm HKT 由 lgong

Today (11/18/2008) we released Firefox China Edition, which can be downloaded at g-fox.cn and other popular download sites. Based on the tremendously successful Firefox 3, the China Edition is a super-charged version that provides a whole range of benefits to Internet users in China.

1. The China edition (literally) creates more browsing space by providing Live Margins, a sidebar to the right of the main browsing window. Live Margins provides additional search results, relevant information, music, video, and much more, all at the same time allowing the user to continue normal browsing activities in other tabs. This is a unique solution to the longstanding problem of tab browsing where only one tab is visible at any time. Live Margins gather information from multiple sources (such as typical search engines but also Wikipedia and other more vertical and focused information websites such as financial sites and weather forecast) and provide a comprehensive information feed that is more 360 degree (and not just a flat list of web links).

2. The China edition provides a number of convenience features. For example, it has a built-in button to let users easily choose the display fonts (among those available on the user’s particular system) and change their sizes. It has another one-button access to desktop functions such as Calculator and to browser shortcuts. It also enables a number of tab operations that are favored by local Chinese users, such as double click to close a tab (instead of having to bring that tab to the front and then find the little x to click on).

I strongly encourage you to try this out at g-fox.cn and also provide feedback at the discussion forum there. Note there are both a Chinese version and an English version, and we provide downloads that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The English version also has the same services targeted at users in China, so it may not bring up the liquor store in your neighborhood strip mall. Personally, I have been using this drag function as an online dictionary — try it and you will like it, no more need to open a dictionary site and type in the word.

This release reaffirms our long-held belief that our mission is to keep the internet open and freely accessible, and the best way to achieve that is to provide viable choices for people to get online and have a personalizable user experience. And the best way to achieve viability is to continue to innovate.

Moreover, one of our unique strength is our willingness, and ability, to partner and collaborate. In this release, we specifically partnered with a number leading content providers in the local market. So now you can monitor that Youku video (the Chinese Youtube) in Live Margins while keeping an eye on your regular work; you can listen to background music off the hits list provided by Sina Music. You can simply highlight a word and with a little drag motion, you can view, via Live Margins, restaurant reviews provided by Dianping (the Chinese Yelp), artist info and songs from Yobo (the Chinese Pandora), and of course search results from Baidu. You can also access Chinese books online (provided by 17K), shop online (360Buy), and see maps and a ton of other information at your finger tips. We have had Linkool Labs as our technology partner in developing Live Margins. They have separately developed Juice, a Firefox addon in English and targetd at western (North American) users, which is based on the same basic concepts but with different UI elements and linked to a different set of web services.

The release of the Firefox China Edition is an ambitious experiment on the part of the Mozilla world. We would very much like to hear your views and experiences with this experiment. Do let us know!

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为什么记者记不住谁说什么

提交: 2008 July 10, 12:59pm HKT 由 lgong

我多年前在亚洲其他一个汉语地区看到记者采访我一个朋友，第二天报上登出来，引我朋友的话，说“电脑终端不应该与主机联线，因为会浪费”。后果可想而知，我朋友怒不可言。时过二十年，我们的记者进步也很有限。日前某网上媒体报道我“表示对于Opera完全为了广告的纯商业化行为感到反感”，不仅会造引人注目的标题，还会造无中生有的句子。我提到Opera在最新发布时公司自嘲说他们以前以浏览器广告著称。我个人对Opera没有意见。别的公司怎样发展，自有其自己的想法，不用也不需要我的看法。

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火狐3发布48小时下载超过1200万

提交: 2008 June 20, 11:27am HKT 由 lgong

火狐3自周三凌晨发布创下24小时下载吉尼斯纪录后，热浪持续，48小时下载超过1200万，现在仍每分钟下载约2500份。（这个统计数字不包含原有火狐用户通过自动更新升级到火狐3。）

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火狐浏览器3昨日首发800多万人下载

提交: 2008 June 19, 2:23pm HKT 由 lgong

昨天北京时间凌晨两点半，火狐浏览器在全世界首发。当日（按24小时计算）共下载了800多万次，具体的世界纪录数目过几天由吉尼斯确认。下载数量的前十位是：美国(第一位，260多万)，德国，日本，西班牙，英国，法国，伊朗，意大利，加拿大，波兰。大陆地区约18万，属于慢热型。恐怕大多数人没想到的是伊朗就有快19万人下载。谋智网络配合世界下载日，也举行了媒体招待和体验火狐浏览器的活动，应邀从杭州专程来京的文少华先生，常年主持火狐中文版本地化开发社区的工作，在会上介绍了社区历年来的工作成绩。南开大学研究生，火狐校园大使杨波也介绍了火狐南开校园版的开发和使用经验。整个过程中，大屏幕实时更新最新下载记录，每冲过一个坎，特别是10万大关，大家热烈鼓掌庆祝。火狐3的发布使我们在国内的发展开始了崭新的一页。2008年应该是火狐中国年！

Mozilla Sponsors Tsinghua University 2008 Debating Competition

提交: 2008 June 16, 3:02pm HKT 由 lgong

This year, Mozilla Online became the title sponsor of the fourth annual debating competition at Tsinghua University, Beijing. As part of the sponsorship, one leg of the knock-out competition was between the School of Humanities and Team A of the College of Biosciences, where the topic was “Should Open Source Software Become Mainstream Software”. The Humanities team was (randomly) assigned the position to argue for the proposition, and won hands down. (They were knocked out by the eventual champion, Law School.)

Afterwards, we invited both teams to the office to talk about their experience. Once given the topic, both teams had to scramble to learn as much as possible about the topic area and they often went to their computer science friends for help. They went into the actual debate with a ton of questions still in their mind, and left with even more questions. It became apparent that, as is largely the case in China, the argument around open source swirls mostly around the issue of monopoly. Much less is said or known about the underlying economics and efficiency argument; nor about the over arching issue of open systems, open standards, open Internet, and open society.

All in all, this has been a great event to sponsor. A lot of fun too — the awards ceremony staged a friendly between teams from Tsinghua University and the People’s Univesity, and topic was, on university campuses, should men chase girls or should it be the other way around. We did not need that debate when I was in Tsinghua — only about 15% students were female back then.

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火狐3将临：本月18日北京时间大家一起共创单日软件下载吉尼斯纪录

提交: 2008 June 13, 8:29pm HKT 由 lgong

经过世界各地开源高手几年的努力，世界上最快，最安全，最个性化的火狐浏览器最新版Firefox3将在美国硅谷时间6月17日上午10点正式亮相。这次与往年不同的是大家齐心协力准备在当天创下24小时内软件下载的吉尼斯纪录。希望大家尽快去 http://www.spreadfirefox.com/zh-CN/worldrecord 承诺下载，然后当天去得到全新的火狐浏览器。大家也可到时来谋智网络（www.mozillaonline.com）直接下载。让我们共同努力，共创未来。

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高级技术讲座（本周日） — How to fix web sites that don’t work correctly in Firefox

提交: 2008 April 15, 5:36pm HKT 由 lgong

著名的开源人物David Baron近期再次来华，并安排本周日在清华FIT楼以 “Debugging the Web：looking at Web sites that don’t work correctly in Firefox, and how they can be fixed”的题目与社区和广大爱好者交流，特别欢迎学生参加。地址选在FIT为了方便，所有人都欢迎。

Mozilla 技术讲座

===============

时间：2008年4月20日（周日）下午2：00-4：30

地点：清华大学东门FIT楼二层多功能厅

主题：Debugging the Web

报告人：L. David Baron（Mozilla工程师）

为外地的朋友，我们会整理讲座视频，与大家分享这次活动！

David Baron is a software engineer at Mozilla Corporation, where he works on Mozilla’s implementations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout algorithms (computing the positions of objects), fixing memory leaks, and other things. He has been working on Mozilla for almost ten years, and is a member of the W3C CSS working group.

David Baron 也是摄影爱好者，他的作品可见 [www.flickr.com] 或 http://dbaron.org/images/david-2008-01-19-dsc03520-335×400

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参加开源运动的四个层次

提交: 2008 April 15, 5:20pm HKT 由 lgong

本月7日历时4个月的清华“火狐杯”软件设计大赛终于落下帷幕。我有机会参加了闭幕式并颁发了火狐特别奖。发言时提到参加开源的形式多种多样，但深度大有不同。

（一）参加开源社区的活动，譬如谋智网络或火狐社区组织的活动，也许是技术讲座，也许是理念推广，等等。

（二）使用开源的技术。譬如说上网用火狐浏览器，搭网站用Appache服务器，等等。使用开源技术，并不一定要求你的产品或业务也是开源的。你可以在开发自己的商业软件，但不妨使用火狐的平台或是用Java技术。

（三）了解开源社区和技术的相关规则。譬如说开源技术的几种许可方式（GPL，LGPL，BSD，等等），他们的共同点和不同点。再譬如说开源社区的行为准则，介入方式，运作模式。

（四）理解开源运动的道理。除了一些表面上的理念，开源运动之所以发展到今天，具有很强的经济基础和法律依据。譬如说，据统计，世界上90%左右的软件开发工作是开发“非卖品”软件，为公司内部运营需要。对于这些工作，开源和共享会带来很可观的经济效益，又不影响商业成绩，所以有一定必然性。

我感觉在第一和第二层次的人多些，往第三和第四层次走的人少些。写这篇短文是希望能促使在国内软件行业里产生更多的开源高手。想要在开源界深入发展，不能等别人来教你，必须自己多努力了！

宫力

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中文本地化八剑客年末做客谋智网络

提交: 2007 December 31, 12:18am HKT 由 lgong

本月22号下午我们在谋智网络举行了火狐本地化工作小组的第一次见面会。强调的是“见面”二字。因为这些火狐的积极支持者虽然共同努力做出很多成绩，但大家都是网上神交数年，今天才第一次物理上的会面。我们非常高兴地请到了zh-cn版的“开山者”文少华（从杭州赶来）以及mozine社区的核心人物等共八位“大侠”，包括金箭（北京），Eric Chu（上海），Sun ERI的Serena Xiao（北京），Dudu（吉林），King（哈尔滨）， Fishbone（济南），发条猫（北京）。（还有数位大侠因各种原因此次无法出席，希望以后有机会谋面。）同时参加活动的还有在北京的其他同仁包括Alfred Peng （带腿伤上场）， Rachel Zhang，一些社区成员，和几位自称专门来“听故事”的在校学生。

会上八位来宾逐个讲述了自己走上火狐之路的过程和其中的趣事。文少华当初因找不到合适的中文版，就自己动手，做出了最受欢迎的Mozilla（后来演变成火狐）浏览器的中文包。他的故事百分之百地体现了开源软件的精神。其他人的故事也各有千秋，改日有机会详细说来。

火狐浏览器2007年在中国有飞步的发展，据不完全统计，从年初的百万用户稳步上升到目前的大约四百万常规用户。预祝火狐中国社区在2008年继续繁荣昌盛。谢谢大家！

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反对任何形式的恶意推广

提交: 2007 December 30, 11:43pm HKT 由 lgong

近期有些关心火狐的朋友告知了一些网上“恶意推广”的案例。这些所谓的“推广者/公司”利用各种机会不择手段“劝”用户下载火狐浏览器。他们的这种行为不仅影响恶劣，同时也混淆了视听。

谋智网络向大家郑重说明，我们以Mozilla宣言为准则，一贯尊重用户的自由选择，以给广大用户提供良好的上网体验为目标，坚决反对任何形式的恶意推广行为。

据了解，这些所谓“推广者”并不理解火狐的真正意义，恐怕连火狐是什么都不清楚。他们的真实目的仅仅是趁机赚网上的推广费用；而这样的行为也不仅限于国内。美国的Mozilla公司每周也会收到许多用户送来的报告。有效的解决办法之一就是在不理会这种“广告”的同时，及时向我们以及其他提供推广费用的公司或部门报告这些恶意推广的链接。一旦去除了这些假“推广者”相关的经济来源，恶意推广也就失去了动力。根据经验，这场斗争可能是持久战。就像对付曾经遍布街头的小广告一样，最重要的第一步是要大家学会识别和忽略他们。

再一次感谢大家对火狐以及谋智网络的一贯支持。

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Firefox火狐本地化小组核心成员座谈会 — 本周六（12月22日）下午2点

提交: 2007 December 19, 6:28pm HKT 由 lgong

我们本周六下午很高兴的请到国内诸位历年来积极推动火狐浏览器本地化/中文化的大腕，来谋智网络与关心火狐在中国发展的朋友们见面交流。他们其中数人还专程从国内各地赶来参加，特此感谢。

希望社区内人士积极参与这次活动。具体通知请看如下链接活动通知及邀请信。

周六下午2点见。

Firefox Campus Ambassadors in China

提交: 2007 December 6, 11:21pm HKT 由 lgong

As soon as the term started in September, we (Mozilla Online) immediately went about looking for campus ambassadors who share the passion for open internet, innovative technology, and Firefox, and who can help spread Firefox on the campus. We have so far named four ambassadors for the following universities: Nankai University in Tianjin, BUAA (or Behang), Tsinghua University, and Peking University. As the first public event, last Saturday we sponsored the annual student festival at Tsinghua’s Institute of Software. Tomorrow (12/7) evening at 7:30pm Jia Mi will speak on Firefox technologies and Firefox 3.0 at BUAA. For a glimpse of the ambassadors, refer to http://mozillaonline.com/marketing/amba-show.html. Those interested in becoming an ambassador for Firefox can check out http://mozillaonline.com/marketing/ambassador.html for more program details. I should note that given that we are in China, these events (including various information such as announcements and reports) will be primarily in Chinese.

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火狐的校园大使们

提交: 2007 December 6, 11:06pm HKT 由 lgong

自从九月各高校开学以后，我们就一直在寻找合适的学生作火狐的校园大使。日前已正式任命四位，分别是南开大学的杨波，北航的张照宇，清华大学的张佳，和北京大学的阮肖。他们的信息和活动内容参见http://mozillaonline.com/marketing/amba-show.html。上周六（12/1）晚上，通过张佳联系，谋智网络独家赞助了清华软件学院一年一度的学生节。明天（12/7）晚上七点半，张照宇在北航组织火狐技术论坛，由谋智网络的北航校友米嘉主讲，欢迎大家参加。（我到时也去“凑个份子”，聊聊职业规划之类同学们关心的事。）

我们计划在目前四所学校的基础上，逐渐发展更多的校园大使。有兴趣的同学可到http://mozillaonline.com/marketing/ambassador.html了解这项活动的详细内容。祝大家学习顺利，生活愉快。

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Put Money Where Your Heart Is — Support Banks That Support Open Platforms

提交: 2007 November 9, 3:50pm HKT 由 lgong

I am sitting here talking to Bill Xu, founder of ZEUUX, a China-based open source, free software, organization, and quite inspired by his initiative to get Chinese banks to support non-IE, non-Microsoft users in their online banking systems.

The Mozilla Manifesto stated very eloquently that the internet is an increasingly important element in modern life and it is crucial to keep it open, innovative, and accessible. One way towards ensuring openness is to provide users with choice. It is the lack of choice that Bill has issues with some Chinese banks, notably China Merchant Bank (CMB). Like some other Chinese banks, CMB got sold a Microsoft-based online banking solution and is offering its services via only ActiveX, a component that is proprietary and available on Windows but not other systems. As a result, if you are a Linux or Apple user, or even if you use Firefox on Windows, you would not be able to complete login.

So Bill started a campaign earlier this year (see [www.zeuux.com]) with an open letter to CMB. It has generated a lot of following, with tons of comments on the forum and around 200 similar open letters written by supporters. The US-based Free Software Foundation also issued a letter in support of this initiative (see [www.fsf.org]).

So far CMB and other ActiveX-only banks are not responding publicly but according to some sources the campaign has instigated a lot of heated debate inside these banks. It is ironic that, although it is well publicized that the Chinese government has officially been backing open source and has spent a lot of fiscal money into efforts to promote Linux and other programs (see Red Flag, Red Office, etc.), right under its nose the banks are locked into proprietary systems such that these government-supported computer systems could not be used to access day-to-day banking services. A side note — it is said that some MII (Ministry of Information Industry) public service sites are locked into proprietary Microsoft features, thus precluding the very people who support MII’s own Linux initiative.

But not all banks are Microsoft-only banks. One shining example is Shanghai Puding Development Bank, whose Firefox friendly website has fans celebrating. See for example http://yx.takeback.net/175/pf-ebank-is-better.html, where the customer was also able to use this platform-neutral feature to complete transactions on the popular Taobao C2C site, which recently officially declared to support only IE, which drew a lot of protests.

Bill and his cohorts keep a close watch on the Chinese banks and maintain a list of “good banks” that support non-IE, non-Microsoft platforms (see [www.zeuux.com]). Interestingly, most if not all western banks operating in China are on the good-bank list. And many of them are getting RMB licenses in the very near future.

The Mozilla Manifesto prescribes that the simplest way to support Mozilla and its principles is to use Firefox. An extension of this is to put your savings into only banks that support open platforms. Money talks, and the banks will listen.

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Fireforx Affliates Program in China — Firefox火狐互联网浏览器在线推广计划

提交: 2007 November 7, 7:23pm HKT 由 lgong

Ever since Firefox released its simplified Chinese editions (zh-cn), its user based in China has been increasing steadily. There are also many websites devoted to Firefox. Many of these are genuine efforts at promoting Firefox, but some are poorly designed and constructed, and more worryingly some are misleading.

Mozilla Online in the past weeks have announced its online promotion program — the affiliates program. The full extent of the program can be found at [www.mozillaonline.com], where you can also see a list of websites that have joined as members.

Please help us spread the word and ask your friends (and everyone else) to have their websites join as official promotion members!

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Why Is Mozilla Successful — Speaking at ICOS in Taipei

提交: 2007 November 7, 6:57pm HKT 由 lgong

Last week I attended the International Conference on Open Source (ICOS) held in Taipei. The 3-day event was well attended by open source community activists (including geeks, techies, and school teachers, Chinese and westerners, among many others), government officials, and corporate sponsors. There were a lot of the usual “soul searching” on what an open source based company should be doing, how to counter Microsoft, etc. So by the time my speaking turn came on the second day, I gave a talk that focused on what Mozilla is and why it has been so successful. I include my slide deck here for those interested — Mozilla and Its Success Factors.

My main points for Mozilla’s success are as follows (not in any particular order):

Mozilla is a successful product (something that a lot of users love);
It is an open platform (that enables the building of numerous add-ons and standalone applications);
It is a movement supported by an ever expanding community where members drive, contribute, and participate in all facets of the movement;
Mozilla’s primary interest is for public benefits, not for commercial gains (as demonstrated by the Mozilla Manifesto);
Mozilla is well run with maximum transparency and accountability.

It is hard to find any other entity that matches the above profile. In particular, I strongly believe that the last two points are benchmarks that truly distinguish Mozilla from other pretenders.

Mozilla Manifesto in Traditional Chinese Translation

提交: 2007 October 21, 10:28pm HKT 由 lgong

I wrote about a pending translation of Mitchell’s Mozilla Manifesto into traditional Chinese. Bob Chao, who is based in Taipei and previously translated the Principles section of the Manifesto, just posted the entire translation at [blog.bobchao.net]. Much appreciated!

Webmaster Roundtable at Mozilla Online on 10/27/2007

提交: 2007 October 21, 10:20pm HKT 由 lgong

After a quiet period around the national holiday golden week, I am here to announce another event at our offices. This coming Saturday, 10/27, at the usual time of 3pm, we will be hosting a webmaster forum; or in Chinese terminology, this is more like a forum for heads of websites. We would like to exchange experiences and discuss ideas around promoting Firefox on the web. Mozilla Online will also use this chance to unveil its “affiliates program”. There will be a number of webmasters attending, but the event is open to everyone and all are most welcome to drop by. Light refreshment will be provided.

There is a more detailed announcement, in Chinese, posted at http://groups.google.com/group/firefoxer-china/browse_thread/thread/d2e618369198469. See you Sat!

Mozilla Manifesto Chinese Translation

提交: 2007 October 19, 11:55pm HKT 由 lgong

A couple of month back Rachel Zhang of Sun Microsystems in China volunteered an initial translation of Mitchell’s Mozilla Manifesto and posted it on my blog. After planning this for quite some time, this week Rachel and I finally sat down for a few hours and together we went again and again over the original text and revised the translation substantially. We still feel that the result could be further enhanced but decided to put this version 0.2 out for now. We invite comment and feedback and will work on it again at a later time. I have enclosed the (Simplified) Chinese version below; and for ease of reference and propogation, I also enclosed a PDF file here that includes both the original English text and our translation (Mozilla Manifesto Chinese Translation v0.2 (2007.10.17)) Finally, rumor has it that Bob Chao in Taipei is going to produce a Traditional Chinese version. I will link to it as soon as it is available.

Now the translated text.

Mozilla宣言

作者：Mitchell Baker

原作版本及日期：v.0.9, 2007.02.13

翻译：张羽，宫力

翻译版本及日期：v.0.2, 2007.10.17

引言

互联网作为人们生活的一部分，其重要性日益增加。

Mozilla是一个全球化的社区。社区成员们坚信开放，创新，和机遇是互联网持续健康发展的关键因素。作为一个社区，我们从1998年开始为确保互联网的发展造福所有用户而共同努力。我们因创作Mozilla Firefox网络浏览器而广为人知。

Mozilla基于社区创建世界一流的开放源代码软件，并且开拓各种新式的合作活动。我们志同道合，致力于改善广大互联网用户的上网体验。

通过共同努力，我们总结出一系列准则并相信它们是保证公共利益和商业活动能够受益于互联网的决定性因素。我们在以下的Mozilla宣言里列出这些准则。

这些准则并非自行可以实现的。互联网的开放和参与需要大家的个人努力，团队协作，和发挥领导作用。Mozilla基金会承诺推行Mozilla宣言里制定的准则。我们邀请更多的同仁加入我们，共同奋斗使互联网变得更好。

准则

1. 互联网是现代生活不可分割的一部分，是教育，交流，合作，商业，娱乐，以及整体社会的关键组成部分。

2. 互联网是全球公共资源，必须保证开放性和可用性。

3. 互联网应该丰富人类生活。

4. 用户的网络安全是基本要求，不可忽视。

5. 互联网用户必须能够按照个人意愿决定如何使用互联网。

6. 作为公共资源的互联网其有效性取决于在网络协议，数据格式，以及内容上的互联互通，创新，和世界各地用户的自主参与。

7. 自由和开放源代码软件有助于互联网作为公共资源的持续发展。

8. 透明的社区流程有利于提升社区的可参与性，责任制，和诚信度。

9. 互联网发展过程中的商业化参与有众多优点。维持商业目标和公共利益之间的平衡至关重要。

10. 扩展互联网的公共利益层面是一个非常重要的目标，值得我们赋予时间、精力，和承诺。

推行Mozilla宣言

推行Mozilla宣言里的准则有多种途径。我们欢迎广泛的活动并期待参与者发挥像在Mozilla其他项目中那样的创造性。对于尚未深入参与Mozilla项目的个人，支持宣言的最简单而

有效的办法就是使用Mozilla Firefox以及其他体现Mozilla宣言准则的产品。

Mozilla基金会的承诺

Mozilla基金会承诺支持Mozilla宣言。具体地，我们将会：

* 建立和支持符合宣言准则的开放源码技术和社区；

* 开发符合宣言准则的优秀消费类产品；

* 利用Mozilla在知识产权（诸如版权和商标），组织机构，资金，和声誉等方面的资产使互联网保持为开放的平台；

* 提倡为公共利益创造经济价值的模式；并且

* 在公共言论中和互联网业界推广Mozilla宣言。

Mozilla基金会的部分活动，目前包括消费类产品的研发和推广，主要通过基金会全资子公司Mozilla公司进行。

邀请

Mozilla基金会邀请所有支持Mozilla宣言准则的同仁一起探索，将宣言里对互联网的构想变为现实。

Mozilla Online Presenting at Beijing Software Freedom Day

提交: 2007 September 17, 5:26pm HKT 由 lgong

On Saturday 09/15/2007, Mozilla Online sponsored and participated in Software Freedom Day in Beijing, which was part of a gloabl event held around the world. The Beijing event was held at the FIT building at Tsinghua University — FIT stands for Future Internet Technology, which houses the Institute of Information Sciences that consists of all the IT related departments and labs. (Reportedly, the futuristic name FIT was insisted upon by the main donor of the building, Li Ka-Shing.)

Mozilla Online had a booth, manned/womenned by Jack Guo, Jia Mi, Wendy Zhao, and Doris Wang, who sacrified another weekend. Jia Mi also gave a talk on Mozilla/Firefox Past and Future. The event was well attended, especially by students, and we already received resumes from some of them A few photos of the event are kept on http://picasaweb.google.com/lgatlarge.

We anticipate to continue sponsor, support, and participant in events that promote open web and open standards.

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DBaron — He Came, He Saw, and He Spoke

提交: 2007 September 8, 11:13pm HKT 由 lgong

Today’s technical talk by David Baron (dbaron) was attended by close to 60 people, another full house at Mozilla Online. As usual, photos of this event are posted on http://picasaweb.google.com/lgatlarge.

The main part of the talk lasted just over an hour, with Q&A lasting another hour. One of the more intriging questions raised (by someone who once wrote a home-grown browser) is how IME events, especially those associated with inputing Chinese characters, are handled by Firefox.

The audience included participants from a few large companies (Google, Sun, Sohu) and a number of startups. A person living in Shanghai who could not attend in person asked one of his friends from Beijing to join the event. We also got a request from Hong Kong to provide an audio link so people could listen in. (We did not get the request in time to set things up this time, but will consider providing such an option in the future.) The session was videotaped by IT168.com and will be made available there. (I will provide a link here as soon as I get it.)

The fact that David got involved in Mozilla the year he entered Harvard reminded me of a true story. It was 1996/7 and I was at JavaSoft. One day a message came around from a youngster who wanted to become an intern. The only “problem” was that he was still in high school and Sun did not take interns that early. When Sun politely responded by saying that we would consider him once he started college, he replied that he could not wait that long — he wanted to be part of the Java moment then and there and felt that it would be too late if he waited.

Until next time …

Open House, Open Minds

提交: 2007 September 5, 3:19pm HKT 由 lgong

Last Saturday weather was really cooperating as we held our open house — mild, breezy, and good views of Summer Palace and the western mountains from our windows.

About 40 people came, and they represented a wide spectrum of our community. There were folks from the Sun Mozilla engineering group and the Sohu user experience group, who work out of the same office complex; cool people from web properties such as Xiaonei network (the Chinese Facebook), IT168.com, and the up-and-coming financial website caibangzi.com; individual developers and activists from various Firefox communities (such as firefox.net.cn); and owners of the popular Firefox bulletin board on the well-know Tsinghua BBS (SMTH). Then there was the airplane mechanic, who confessed of not being a hardcore IT expert but offered to help with translations because he did a ton of translations of airplane repair manuals. Creative Commons China Project also attended in force, led by Professor Chunyan Wang of the People’s University.

The group surveyed the current affairs of Firefox in China and debated ways to get more people to use this browser. One major and very visible barrier is the recent insistance by (basically) all Chinese banks to implement ActiveX as part of their e-banking deployment, therefore rendering all non-IE-based browsers useless. One user complained to Bank of Beijing and got a lengthy response/excuse/explanation that is full of technical jargons and at the same time makes absolutely no technical sense whatsoever. (The letter from the Bank is posted on the net.) Many also expressed a strong belief that Chinese users prefer fuller-featured, pre-packaged browsers and urged Mozilla to consider prepackaging popular extensions. And of course someone suggested that we hold an Oscar-like annual event to give awards to best extensions in various categories.

We also spent a fair amount of time on how to get more Mozilla/Firefox documents translated into Chinese. There was the argument that some potential volunteers get scared away by Mozilla documents, which tend to be long and heavy duty, and if we were to break these down into smaller chunks, we might entice more people to help out. Well, food for thought here.

There was a preview of some of the new features from the upcoming Firefox 3, and some networking, and the session was punctuated by trips to the fridge for ice creams. The 3-hour event was partially captured on camera and some of the photos can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/lgatlarge (note — I did not shoot these photos).

We thank everyone who found time to visit and look forward to seeing more in the coming days. Do not forget to come to David Baron’s talk this week Sat, same time, same place, same ice creams (new ones, not left overs!

Cheers,

Tech Talk at Mozilla Online This Saturday 3pm 09/08/2007

提交: 2007 September 4, 10:03pm HKT 由 lgong

Hot on the heels of our open house last Saturday (about which I will blog shortly), we are pleased to present the first talk at the Firefox Forum, which will be a series of seminars for the Firefox community at large held at our offices. As the first speaker, we are fortunate to have David Baron, a long-time and very senior participant in the Mozilla community. The talk will be in English.

Talk title: Web Page Layout/Display in Mozilla

Speaker: L. David Baron

Date/Time: 3pm, Saturday, September 8, 2007

Place: Mozilla Online Ltd., SP-Tower C-1701, Tsinghua Science Park

Talk abstract. This talk will give an overview of the code in Mozilla that is used to display a Web page and the Web standards that code is implementing. The talk is mostly about the parts involved in the appearance of the page on the screen (CSS, layout, graphics) and a little bit about scripting (Document Object Model, Javascript).

Above the speaker. David Baron is a software engineer at Mozilla Corporation, working mainly on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), layout (calculating positions of elements), and fixing memory leaks. He has been working on Mozilla since he was in college. He is the owner of Mozilla core modules including Layout Engine, Style System, String, and Mozilla Tools, a peer of several other Mozilla modules, and a member of the W3C CSS working group.

Light refreshment will be served.

Mozilla Online Ltd.

SP Tower C-1701, Tsinghua Science Park

1 Zhongguancun Road East

Haidian District, Beijing 100084, P.R. China

北京谋智网络技术有限公司

北京市海淀区中关村东路1号清华科技园科技大厦C座1701 （邮编100084）

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谋智网络Open House （09/01/2007）3pm

提交: 2007 August 27, 4:46pm HKT 由 lgong

经过一系列的准备，我们的办公室终于可以用了（虽然免不了还有点装修的味道）。现诚挚的邀请对火狐等有兴趣者参加我们第一次Open House活动。活动时间、地点、内容都已在邀请函中详细说明。

如果您有时间参加本次Open House，请写邮件给firefoxer.register@gmail.com。最好在回信中提供您的姓名和联系方式（希望您能够提供手机号码，参会前我们会再次和您进行电话确认）。我们知道人数，更便于准备茶点。您的联系方式不会用于任何其他事宜，请放心。

这次活动经过征求大家意见，决定在周六下午举办，主要因为许多人平时上班较忙。占用周末，可能有些网友不一定能抽出时间。我们今后会在不同时间段争取举办一系列的其他活动，譬如组织技术讲座等等。希望这周六大家多多出主意。

想先一睹为快的朋友可看看[picasaweb.google.com]。我们的活动也会像办公室的风格一样，简单明了，舒服但不奢侈。形式固然重要，但更重要的是内容。

周六见！

宫力

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火狐本地化联络组启动

提交: 2007 July 12, 12:17am HKT 由 lgong

最近一直在与许多人讨论如何能更好地帮助火狐浏览器本地化方面的工作。讨论来讨论去，大家都有同感，就是与同行联络不够多，也不一定知道都有谁有类似的兴趣。两天前我们大概十个人坐在楼下B1的SPR咖啡馆聊了一下午，觉得有必要组织组织。

具体说是启动一个（暂时名为）火狐本地化联络组。意思是先把大家集起来，再共议大业。启动方式首先是请大家给firefoxer.register@gmail.com发邮件，告知你有兴趣。（最好能注明你的名字，手机号，和所在城市，以便联系和计划活动。但如果不愿意透露太多个人信息，也没关系。能理解。）同时我们开设了一个中文的IRC频道，irc.mozilla.org#firefox-cn，可随时通话。邮箱由张羽，彭洋，和过元铮三位志愿者负责收集信息。频道上也会常常有人。需要IRC软件的可到[https:] 给自己的火狐安装一个叫chatzilla的插件，然后在网址的地方写 irc://irc.mozilla.org#firefox-cn就可以用了。

有几件事需要说明。首先，这个联络组不是为了主持社区的技术项目，也不替代现有的组织或活动。其唯一目的就是把大家串起来，以方便联系和互相帮助。譬如说，大家可以讨论是否要建立论坛或者如何组织什么样的活动会有意思和意义。另外，虽然我们用火狐作名字（以后也可改），但任何与火狐相关的都是可考虑范围之内的。再之，本地化不仅仅局限于英文翻译成中文。为中国市场量体裁衣定作适用的插件，界面，主题，特性，等等，都是很值得探讨的话题。还有，不仅目前在火狐上做贡献的朋友们可以加入，任何对火狐等相关的技术，产品，市场各方面有所关心的人都在很受欢迎之列。

我这里先抛砖引玉。期待大家共同讨论我们的发展方向。

一定不要忘了给联络组发邮件。并请互相转告。

最后，谢谢前天一块儿讨论的朋友们。他们是（随机排列）陆伯鹰 (Brian Lu), 沙佳瑜 (Leon Sha), 颜强 (Even Yan), 张羽 (Rachel Zhang), 彭洋 (Alfred Peng), 宫力 (Li Gong), 过元铮 (Jack Guo), 杨小云 (Sharon Yang), 石赟昀 (Sherring Shi), and 杨波 (Bo Yang)。

Firefox CN Localization Liaison Group Started

提交: 2007 July 11, 11:26pm HKT 由 lgong

Recently a bunch of us have been discussing how best we can help out with all the Mozilla/Firefox localization effort, by contributing time, effort, and resources, and by facilitating communications and collaboration. It has become obvious that people relevant to this effort would like to get more organized.

After a more detailed discussion held at the SPR Cafe in the basement of our building at Tsinghua Science Park two days ago, we decided to initiate a grouping, which we call, for the time being, the Firefox CN Lozalization Liaison Group. I know this is a mouthful — members of this group can decide what to call it eventually or what nicknames to adopt.

The creation of this group is not meant to drive any community project work or replace any of the existing activities. Its sole purpose is to facilitate communication and collaboration among all the folks who are involved with localizing Firefox and other related products. Indeed this is not necessarily limited to Firefox. For example, its scope can also cover the localization of Firefox extensions. Moreover, by localization, we meant more than Han-Hua (translating English strings to Chinese). For instance, creating adaptations and extensions for the China market would be very interesting. [And this is why I did not use L10N as a shorthand, as that is commonly taken to mean just translation of the language.] Finally, this group is not limited to people who are already contributing to the Mozilla/Firefox projects. Anyone interested in the technologies, products, deployment and other issues could join.

We decided to get organized first by asking people to sign up and also openning an IRC channel in Chinese. Later we will see whether it is benefitial to establish mailing aliases, forums, and to organize (social and/or project-related) gatherings and events.

To sign up, please send email to firefoxer.register@gmail.com , which is monitored by Alfred Peng and Rachel Zhang at Sun ERI and Jack Guo at Mozilla Online. It would be best if you send in some information about yourself (such as your name, city where you are, your cellphone number, etc.) so the group can better understand where its members are; but if for privacy reasons you decide not to include such information, that would be OK too.

The IRC channel is open at irc.mozilla.org#firefox-cn. For those needing an IRC tool, you can go to [https:] and install a Firefox add-on called chatzilla, and then type into the URL box irc://irc.mozilla.org#firefox-cn and get connected to many of us.

A word of thanks to those who were present at the SPR cafe discussion (in no particular order): 陆伯鹰 (Brian Lu), 沙佳瑜 (Leon Sha), 颜强 (Even Yan), 张羽 (Rachel Zhang), 彭洋 (Alfred Peng), 宫力 (Li Gong), 过元铮 (Jack Guo), 杨小云 (Sharon Yang), 石赟昀 (Sherring Shi), and 杨波 (Bo Yang) .

Please remember to send in an email to sign up! (And help spread the word!)

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我的电子邮件地址

提交: 2007 July 6, 10:54pm HKT 由 lgong

谢谢很多人的回音。我的电子邮件地址是，用户名lgong，域名mozilla.com. （所有已给我发评论索要邮件地址的人，我会一一回邮件。）再聊。

宫力

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谋智网络7月正式挂牌并征贤纳士

提交: 2007 July 1, 11:33am HKT 由 lgong

下周一谋智网络正式挂牌营业。我们的地址是

北京谋智网络技术有限公司
北京市海淀区中关村东路1号清华科技园科技大厦C座1701 （邮编100084）

我们目前着重吸引如下几类贤士：

1。战略，计划，市场，公关。在市场分析，客户调查，产品定位，品牌管理，市场宣传，公共关系等方面有经验有见解。

2。技术人员。对互联网技术有热情和理解。有建设和运行网站的经验，或有关于浏览器的经验，优先考虑。

3。我们也欢迎在校生来实习。特别欢迎计算机或相关专业，以及商学院的同学。

我们目前组建一个小的核心团队，工作形式和方式灵活，可考虑兼职或非全时的安排。与在华的跨国公司不同的是，我们每一个人都可参与公司各方面的事务与业务，可以直接影响火狐等产品在中国的走向，以及提议和开发崭新一代的互联网技术和产品。一个好主意，几分钟后即可开始实施。

志同道和者直接给我写邮件吧。

宫力

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Beijing Office Open for “Business”

提交: 2007 July 1, 11:01am HKT 由 lgong

Tomorrow, Monday, July 2nd, will be the first day when our new office in Beijing opens its door for business. Our address is:

Mozilla Online Ltd.
SP Tower C-1701, Tsinghua Science Park, 1 Zhongguancun Road East
Haidian District, Beijing 100084, P.R. China

We grabbed the last piece of suitably-sized space in Tsinghua Science Park and we are sandwiched, fittingly in some sense, between Google (we can see their 7-storey building directly down from our office on the 17th floor) and MSN (behind our backs in the next building). Also fittingly perhaps, our neighbors on the 17th floor are two Nasdaq-listed Chinese internet and new media stars — Focus Media (the wildly successful advertising company that has grabbed a lot of display space in office building lobbys and everywhere else there is white space), and a new gaming unit of Kong Zhong, the value-added mobile service provider.

But hold off on your visit for another week — the office is still somewhat of a construction site and we are putting on the finishing touches and putting up some furniture in the coming days. Alfred Peng at Sun has been tracking our office development with his camera and I hope he can post some of his photos online soon.

Apart from the office buildout, we also just finished our registration process. The last hurdle we crossed this past week was to obtain a foreign exchange license so we could set up our bank accounts. This also means we can start paying our bills and meeting our payroll.

Talking about payroll, we need to get some folks onto it. Right now we are searching primarily for people in the following areas:

1. Strategy, planning, marketing, and PR. We are looking for a couple of individuals who have expertise and experience in market analysis, customer research, product positioning, brand management, and communications. Political correctness aside, the best candidates should understand the China market natively and can operate on their own effectively locally.

2. Technology. We are also looking for a couple of people who are passionate about and experts in the latest Internet technologies. Experiences building/running websites and working with browsers are obviously a plus. Must be hands-on.

Apart from competivie pay and benefits, what we really offer uniquely is a chance to join us at the very beginning and have a real impact on how the Internet scene might evolve in China in the coming months/years. Unlike at many large multinationals in China where you are pigeon-holed into a narrow spot and then spend all your time planning and proposing and socializing your brilliant ideas but never actually getting the chance to do anything, at Mozilla Online you will have an opportunity to participate in all aspects of our operations and contribute and affect directly how millions of users might spend their time online. You will see your ideas turn into action in hours rather than days/months/years/never.

We are also interested in having student interns work with us. We are especially interested in those from the Computer Science and related departments, as well as those in the business and management schools.

You know how to find me via email.

Cheers,

Li Gong

Mouzhi for Mozilla — What’s In a Name

提交: 2007 June 8, 1:17pm HKT 由 lgong

Last time I wrote that the new Mozilla entity in China is called 北京谋智网络技术有限公司, for which a direct translation to English would be Beijing Mouzhi Network Technologies Ltd. I should explain how the name came about. (But please remember the English name of the company is Mozilla Online Ltd.)

The first thing to note is that China operates on Chinese characters, which is not surprising until you realize the full extent of the rule is that English names are simply not accepted in business matters. For example, if a (ficticious) Mark Smith buys a house in China, he will be required to propose a Chinese name, go through a certification and notarization process to bind that name to himself, before he could obtain the title of the house, which will be issued in his Chinese name only.

Secondly, getting an appropriate name in Chinese is non-trivial. One major difficulty is that Mozilla does not translate literally into Chinese. Even if a name happens to translate, the natural translation may not be suitable. I was told by some IBMers in Beijing that they used to get calls from farmers who would like to buy tractors and all sorts of other industrial equipments, because the Chinese name of IBM was a direct translation of International Business Machines. So we had two choices. One was to go with a phonetic translation. The other was to come up with something that is not linked to the name Mozilla either literally or phonetically. Obviously we preferred the former if it would work out.

We thought about getting the wider Mozilla community involved in proposing names, until we realized, after going through dictionary pages, that there are not many workable combinations of words that resemble the sounds of Mo-Zi. Moreover, two-character company names are almost impossible to obtain in China these days, and we feared that our top choices could be quickly taken by others. So we ended up doing a small scale, private consultation, and quickly reached the conclusion that 谋智 Mou-Zhi was the best choice. (The fact that Mitchell Baker has a quite good background in the Chinese language was a happy coincidence and proved very helpful.) The Chinese name closely resembles the Mo-Zi sound (Mou in Chinese is pronounced exactly as the English sound of Mo in Mozilla), and it has a great meaning in Chinese (seeking wisdom). Plus the particular Zhi character in this case takes a fourth tone, which is usually viewed as a better choice as the ending character for a company name — it is the most firm, certain, and strong tone of the four tones in Mandarin Chinese. We kept quiet and went to try to register the name. And somewhat surprised that we got it.

The final note about company names in China is that they must be well formed. A name has three parts. The region/city where the company is registered, the name of the company, and the type of the business. Our type was determined to be “Network Technologies Ltd.”, and therefore we are Beijing Mou-Zhi Network Technologies Ltd., or 北京谋智网络技术有限公司.

Since we are on names, I could not resist relaying a story. Today a colleague at Mozilla told me that a Chinese community member emailed him with excitement that Gong Li was heading up the China operation but expressed skepticism about the suitability of her background. He thought it was the well-known actress in the movie Raise the Red Lantern. My colleague then half-jokingly suggested that maybe we can get her to be a Firefox ambassador. Anyone out there with the ears of her agent, could you please help put in a nice word?

Li Gong 宫力 (Gong Li)

Bootstrapping in China

提交: 2007 May 31, 9:39pm HKT 由 lgong

Ever since Mitchell Baker’s introduction (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2007/04/) that brought me back to the Mozilla community after a long sabatical of sorts (http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9723757-7.html), it has been hectic over here in Beijing.

Mozilla’s new presence in China will be officially open for “business” in the June/July time frame as basic operations are being bootstrapped. Our new office is located in Tsinghua Science Park just outside the main gate of Tsinghua University, in the heart of the high-tech scene in northwest Beijing. We are now looking for a few passionate individuals with expertises in business development, marketing and communications, and Internet software technologies.

The new company, which we refer to in English as Mozilla Online Ltd. and in Chinese shorthand as 谋智网络, has a longish official name in Chinese: Beijing Mou-Zhi Network Technologies Ltd. or 北京谋智网络技术有限公司. The words Mou-Zhi in Chinese (谋智) means “seeking wisdom“. Mozilla Online shares the same vision of the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corp., with its goals being increasing adoption of the Firefox browser and other relevant products and technologies in China, building local developer and user communities, developing local partnerships, and participating in and helping to advance the state of art of open source software in China.

As we work out the right priorities for the coming months, year, and beyond, we will be looking to you, the Mozilla and open source community at large, and to thought leaders in China and elsewhere in the world, to participate and provide input. As the operation ramps up, we look forward to your insight, advice, and help. I will continue to use this space to keep you abreast of all the exciting development coming out of China in the future.

Cheers,

Li Gong 宫力

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提交: 2008 December 9, 5:15pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 November 28, 4:09pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 November 18, 1:53pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 November 14, 1:49pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 July 10, 12:59pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 June 20, 11:27am HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 June 19, 2:23pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 June 16, 3:02pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 June 13, 8:29pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 April 15, 5:36pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 April 15, 5:20pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2008 April 15, 4:45pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 December 31, 12:18am HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 December 30, 11:43pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 December 19, 6:28pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 December 6, 11:21pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 December 6, 11:06pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 November 9, 3:50pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 November 7, 7:23pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 November 7, 6:57pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 October 21, 10:28pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 October 21, 10:20pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 October 19, 11:55pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 September 17, 5:26pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 September 8, 11:13pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 September 5, 3:19pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 September 4, 10:03pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 August 27, 4:46pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 July 12, 12:17am HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 July 11, 11:26pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 July 6, 10:54pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 July 1, 11:33am HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 July 1, 11:01am HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 June 8, 1:17pm HKT 由 lgong

提交: 2007 May 31, 9:39pm HKT 由 lgong

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