I really enjoyed this recent interview with Brendan Eich that Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer of Ajaxian did back in 2007. It was slightly technical in parts but mostly talking about Mozilla and JavaScript history as well as Brendan’s own chosen path.
If the future interviews in this new Tech Luminaries series are as good, it wll be a great podcast.
Danny Kim at TechnoKimchi has new browser share numbers in South Korea. It’s pretty ugly.
IE: 98.66% Korean Browser Market Share
If that is not a defacto monopoly (especially when you consider the market share that other browsers have elsewhere in the world), then I don’t know what is.
Background information on why S. Korea is an all-Microsoft, all-Internet Explorer nation is available on older posts on my blog including, the cost of monoculture, update on the cost of monoculture in Korea.
I hope to be able to write another update for 2008 before the end of this year. Whether I can be more positive than I have been in the past is yet to be determined.
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, interviews Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, of Mozilla.
You can find the audio of the interview here:
Open Voices Interview with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
And a transcript of the interview here:
Mitchell Baker Transcript : Open Voices: The Linux Foundation Podcast
Lots of historical information in this interview. Highly recommended.
Jim Zemlin: I’m just curious as to, was Microsoft something that really drove what you were doing? {audio dropout} there a feeling in the people who {audio dropout} worked at the Mozilla Foundation at the time and worked on the project of, you know, “We can’t abide by a de facto monopoly web browser, that in order for the internet to be free, we’ve got to be successful,”? Was that mentality present at the time?
Mitchell Baker: Oh, sure. There are some things about Netscape mentality, but when you get past that, when you get the Mozilla Project, and for example why I was there and stuck with it and why a number of people did, one reason is absolutely that. That the browser turned out to be key in how, you know, human beings access the Internet. And if there’s only one way to do it, and there’s only one way to get to the information on the Internet, and that pathway is controlled by a single business entity and a single business plan, and, you know, one that’s giant and has shown itself to be very aggressive at using its assets to promote itself, then you’re in for a disaster. And I think we can see that. Because in, like, 2000, 2001, 2002 when we didn’t have a good product out on the market yet and there was essentially no browser competition, if you look back to it, you can remember that it was full of pop-up ads and spyware and, you know, whole computers slowing down because of all the stuff that was coming in through the one available browser. So we still believe and feel vindicated that you’ve got to have more than one option in these settings.
The later in the interview:
Jim Zemlin: What is it about a project like this—or Linux or Apache—that is so exciting to people; that motivates people to go to such extreme lengths of sacrificing personal time and, you know, extending huge amounts of emotional, physical energy towards something like that at these type of projects? What is it, in your mind, that drives people to participate?
Mitchell Baker: It’s a set of things. Some people have all of them; some people only have one or two of them. In some cases, it’s the sense that what you’re doing actually matters. And that one can see that the openness of the Internet that we want to live in can be affected, can be made more likely by the work that we do. So that’s one thing.
For many of us, the Internet itself. I sometimes say I have the Internet bug, or I was bitten by the Internet bug. I say that because I had malaria once. {Laughs} You know, it’s in the blood, right. There’s nothing you can do about it. And while you’ve got it and while it’s there, you know, you have to live with it because it’s just unavoidable. And I also feel that way about what I call the Internet bug. Alright, it is just such a powerful tool and so exciting, and there’s so much positive that can happen from it and anything that powerful can have that sort of a dark and unpleasant side. And you roll all those things with the feeling that, “Wow, you know, all of this is possible and we can make it better.” I think I’m not the only one who’s got that bug.
A third reason is technology. We’ve always been blessed that we have great technology and very smart people working on it. And that tends to attract other really smart people. And I think you’ll find, at many open source projects—you’ve named the big ones of course—but many of the smaller ones as well, it’s a love of the technology that’s also important.
And there is a sense, I would say, of community and bonding that is an extreme motivator. Sometimes people ask me why anyone would work on a software project if they weren’t getting paid for it. Well, think about how many people don’t like their job. Or feel like they’ve got expertise that doesn’t get used. Or their colleagues or their management or the people they’re responsible for get in the way. Or the company is going in a direction that doesn’t make sense and cuts off all the interesting projects. And your advancement isn’t based on reputation or skill, it’s based on, you know, who happens to like you. Well, we can mitigate or eliminate almost all of those things in an open source project. And so it turns out a lot of people do not want to be couch potatoes, right. And if you provide a setting in which something really interesting is happening, and it matters; you can see that other people use it and it’s got really smart people working on it, and they will accept you if you find interesting things to do, and some of them will even help you. And you can see the results of that, you know, you can generate a reputation and have people interested in you and have your work used by millions of people. That rolls up into a pretty motivating package.
The later in the interview Zemlin asks Mitchell about Mozilla and trademarks vs. how Linux handles trademarks. That’s maybe the most interesting part of the interview, in my opinion. Finally, Zemlin asks Mitchell for advice re: trademarks and the Linux desktop.
As reported yesterday by Internet Watch (ja) and Broadband Watch (ja), Yahoo! Japan has renewed their software download center and is showcasing both a toolbar for Firefox (Yahoo!ツールバー Firefox版) as well as the Firefox for Yahoo! Japan (available for Mac or Win.) This is good news for all of the Yahoo! Japan users who also like to use Firefox.
I was initially happy to hear that Baidu is now providing a browser-based security service (百度安全中心) which includes a basic vulnerability and virus scanner for users in China but was disappointed to hear that the service is ActiveX based and therefore only available for Internet Explorer on Windows. If you try to use the service without Internet Explorer, you get sent to an error page. Granted, the error page says that Baidu will be supporting Vista and Firefox “soon”, but if this service is via ActiveX controls, those will not work in Firefox (nor Opera, nor Safari, and therefore also not on the Macintosh nor on Linux.) Also Active-X has a history of security problems and as of 2008 US-CERT is recommending disabling ActiveX in IE, so in this case, the bar is set very high for Baidu to provide a truly secure solution via Active.
Baidu has such broad marketshare in China, there are opinions that the computer security industry (selling anti-virus software) would be significantly negatively impacted by this service if Baidu’s service is free. Clearly a free service that would be browser-based (vs. something that is either not free or requires a download) is the easiest option for users, but it’s not clear that such a solution would provide the best security. If this service becomes popular and computer security vendors lose the retail market for security software, it’s not clear that users will be any safer and if the plugin was not designed properly, they may be much worse off.
There is the fact that Macintosh and Linux users are essentially unaffected by viruses and spyware that target the Windows platform, but providing a browser-agnostic solution should be the goal.
Reuters has a nice profile of our Mozilla China team led by Li Gong: Mozilla seeks growth and tie-ups in China market [reuters.com]
California-based Mozilla expects the going to be tough in a country where consumers are largely unaware of open-source and businesses typically base their services solely on [Internet] Explorer, Gong Li, chief executive of Mozilla Online, said on Monday.
Mozilla Online — known as “mou zhi,” or “seek wisdom” in Chinese — now has around 4.5 million regular users in China, said Gong, who previously worked at Sun Microsystems Inc and Microsoft’s MSN unit.
“It’s going to be a challenge raising our market share to our global average (of around 20 percent), since a lot of Chinese services are constructed on an Explorer platform,” he added.
“Five percent is not enough, but it’s our target for the second half of the year,” Gong added. Its current market share in China is about 2 percent.
I was lucky to meet Li just as he was making the decision to join Mozilla and lead our efforts in China last year. China is a tough market for Mozilla in many ways because Windows+IE is so embedded into the culture of computing, but we are growing rapidly due to our new team in Beijing.
For more information on how Microsoft changed their strategy in order to succeed in China, I highly recommend David Kirkpatrick’s article in Fortune from July 2007: How Microsoft conquered China and also a decent review of that article on Techrepublic.
This news is a few weeks old but nonetheless important to note.
Matrix Partners Establishes USD275mn China Fund
Matrix Partners has a new China fund led by David Zhang, who left WI Harper to join Bo Shao at Matrix. This is news to me because Matrix has funded mobile browser OpenWave and the brand new SkyFire (who use Mozilla’s Gecko engine on the server) and Zhang funded Maxthon at WI Harper.
Both Matt Asay and Glyn Moody are pointing to this Guardian article, Can Linux finally unite Korea?, which claims that Linux will be used to try to increase cooperation between North and South Korea. While the goal is a worthy one, the devil is in the details of course.
I’ve outlined in great detail on this blog, the cost of monoculture, and update on the cost of monoculture in Korea, detailing the unique situation South Korea is in with respect to their encryption cipher used only in South Korea for secure transactions over the Internet, and how it requires both Microsoft Windows as well as Internet Explorer.
Thus, when all of these new North Korean Hana Linux Internet users decide to try to make any secure transaction with any South Korean web service which requires the SEED cipher and the Active-X control that SEED must be paired with, they’ll be sadly denied access.
Internet Watch reports, IE7日本語版、自動更新よる配布開始は「2008年2月13日」 (Japanese), that Microsoft Japan will push out the automatic upgrade to IE7 to Japanese users of IE6 on Feb. 13th, 2008. (The schedule was actually announced by Microsoft Japan back in May of 2007.) I checked to make sure that Feb. 13th, 2008 is not a Friday (it is a Wednesday.)
It’s interesting to see how long Microsoft Japan has delayed the automatic upgrade to IE7. The English version came out in Nov. of 2006 and it’s almost 1.5 years later that the Japanese version will be pushed out to the majority of existing Japan-based XP/Vista owners. I have a hunch they’ve used this time to work with Japanese web sites/services to update Japanese websites to support IE7. Why the Japanese launch is a full 3 months behind other locales is probably an interesting story we’ll never hear from the Microsoft Japan IE team.
Just today, the IE team in Redmond promised us an IE8 Beta in the first half of 2008. So just as Japanese users are getting introduced to IE7, they’ll have the IE8 Beta to enjoy as well.
