Mozilla in Asia

• Web 2.0 Expo 2008: Mitchell Baker (Mozilla Foundation)
  Video of Mitchell’s presentation on Mozilla Fennec and our plans for the web on mobile devices.
• Web 2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky (NYU ITP)
  Clay Shirky talks about the impact of the change to society with how groups are using the Internet. Lightly edited speech transcript at Clay’s book blog.
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization
  Clay’s presentation video, Feb. 2008 at Berkman.
• Antonio Gomes on MicroB, Nokia tablets’ Firefox
  Antonio interviewed about the Mozilla-based browser that is on the Nokia N800 series.
• ./iake: 75 | จงระวัง พลังด้านมืดจะครอบงำทุกสิ่ง!
  Minefield Thai test.

Those of you who followed Mozilla in 2007 may remember our 24 hour global community event in September, Mozilla 24.

Mozilla 24 was an amazing continuous 24 hours of Mozilla events held around the world at Stanford University, Paris, Tokyo, and Bangkok all interconnected by live high-definition Internet video (and IRC). Mozilla 24 had presentations (with video) from Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Zak Greant, Dr. David Humphrey, Mike Shaver, Johnathan Nightingale, Atsushi Shimono of Mozillagumi, Masayuki Kanda of NTT, and a panel discussion on the future of the Internet with Mitchell Baker, Dr. Vint Cerf, and Dr. Jun Murai.

In Japan, Mozilla also held a music festival (photos tagged mozilla24 at Flickr) alongside Mozilla 24, the Firefox Rock Festival ‘07 (official photos). One of the community members here in Japan, Yuji, who is a car enthusiast as well as Firefox user, decided to theme his car with Firefox and show it off at the Firefox Rock Festival which was held in Tokyo to showcase a number of awesome independent musicians including Shonen Knife, Qomolangma Tomato, Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re, SLUGGER, MARS EURYTHMICS, Midori, 101a, marron, Kokusyoku Sumire, Naoya Yoshida * APO, AJI, オーノキヨフミ, and Taizo Jinnouchi.

Yuji decided to remodel his car recently so a few folks went to take video of the car on the highway.

A 708 MB mov file of the Firefox car is also available for download.

For those of you who understand Japanese, we also have two other interesting videos at firefoxccstudio.org with musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius) and Mozilla Foundation board member Joi Ito discussing the changing state of music in the Internet age and the importance of the alternative licensing of artworks and music including Creative Commons.  Another video with Cornelius, Joi and musician Ryuchi Sakamoto also discusses similar themes.

Isriya Paireepairit (a.k.a. markpeak) Patipat Susumpow (a.k.a. keng) and Arthit Suriyawongkul (a.k.a. bact), are among the Mozilla community members in Thailand who are working to finalize Thai language support in Firefox. They recently held a bugday at the end of March and pittaya has some photos up on Flickr.  I see there are still some bugs open before we can launch a Thai localization but I’m hoping we can do so soon.

Update: Chakrad Chalayut has a great overview of the bug day here BugAThon at coffee world Silom Rd., and in Thai as well BugAThon ที่ coffee world สีลม.

Last week Mozilla Labs GM Chris Beard was in Tokyo to present on the his view of the future of the web at ZDNet Japan’s builder tech day - open API & beyond event and the (Japan) Open Source Conference 2008 Spring.

Chris gave a presentation introducing Mozilla Labs, which was the first presentation of the Labs projects (Prism, Weave, Personas, etc.) in Japan.  Chris’s presentation was basically only images, and I don’t think we have video anywhere (unfortunately) so we’ll have to wait for the next Labs presentation for something people can download.  You can see most of the screenshots of the presentations in the photo galleries linked below.

News coverage:

• weaveでブラウザとWebサービスの融合を図るMozilla–builder tech day
• 【OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring】「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」—Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”：ITpro
• 「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」、Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”
• Mozilla Labsのトップが語る次世代ブラウザの姿 (go to the second page and click on the photo of amachang and Chris at the bottom)

Blog comments

• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Tokyo/Spring 1日目報告 - SumiTomohikoの日記
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008(OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring)に行ってきました(1日目) - RX-7乗りの適当な日々
  
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Spring/Tokyo - なかむランチ
• OSC2008に行ってきた。 - 「 Firefox ×？＝！」を考えてみる、ブログ。
• Mozilla LabのChris Beard氏のお話 - ウィリアムのいたずらの開発日記
• OSC2008 での Chris Beard のキーノートスピーチ - えむもじら

Photo galleries:

• OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring
• Kazabana - 2008-02-29~03
• Open Source Conference Tokyo
• Mozilla Labs at Open Source Conference Tokyo 2008

Many thanks to Chris for coming out to Tokyo and thank you to all of the Mozillagumi volunteers for helping staff the booth and prepare the user questionnaire.  Thank you to CNet Japan for hosting and Six Apart Japan, Seki-san, David Recordon & Miyagawa-san for the initial event planning.

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.

Chris Beard, VP of Mozilla Labs, will be in Tokyo this week for two speaking engagements.

On Feb. 28th, Chris will be keynoting at ZDNet Japan’s “builder techday: open apis and beyond.” David Recordon and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa from Six Apart will be speaking about open ID and the social graph (Brad Fitzpatrick, Read/Write Web, Google code repository.) Chris will be speaking about the “open web” from Mozilla’s perspective and will probably touch upon many of the subjects Recordon will speak about but also aspects of information that we keep in the browser and how we might share that as well. I’m afraid registration for this event is already closed.

On Feb. 29th, Chris will be keynoting at the Open Source Conference (Tokyo) - Spring 2008.  Registration (jp) will be closing soon so please sign up asap if you plan to attend.

Chris Beard will provide an overview of recent activities at Mozilla including information on exciting new Mozilla Labs development projects currently in the works. He will talk about his vision for the future of the Web and the role of open source in improving our online lives.

This is the first time for any presentation on Mozilla Labs projects in Japan and we’re very excited to have Chris in Tokyo.  Hope to see you at either of these events.

This year I will be focusing more on evangelism of Mozilla in Asia and so I was glad to be able to accept an opportunity to speak about open source and Mozilla in Asia at the upcoming Lift 08 Conference in Geneva, Feb. 6-8, 2008.

My presentation as it stands right now will use Mozilla as an example of open source in Asia, looking at our situation in both East and South East Asia.  I will try to address Glyn Moody’s question about the weakness of GNU/Linux in Japan, and puncture some myths in the process, but I’m not sure there is a clear answer for this complex question.

I would very much appreciate any information you may have about the success or lack thereof of open source software in Asia.  Feel free to leave me comments here.

Also, if you are attending Lift08, please say hello and introduce yourself to me.  I look forward to meeting fellow Lift 08 attendees and hope to hear from others who are working on open source in Asia.

Jasmina Tesanovic and Gen Kanai added to the speaker program

Chang-Won Kim calls for an Asia-wide Internet conference in 2008:
An open letter to Asia’s web industry people - What do you think about AsiaWeb 2008?

But I don’t think I’ve seen many “pan-Asian” web conferences so far. So I think we could imagine a conference where things like these are happening…

- Keynote speeches being made by well-known tech entrepreneurs in China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hongkong, Taiwan, etc. as well as a host of internationally renowned speakers.

- An international launchpad where new ventures in Asia can showcase their newest products (Think TechCrunch 40 or the Demo). English translation will be provided - we all know English-speaking skills and product-development skills are two different sets of skills. VCs are more than welcome to join.

- Panel discussion between professionals from different countries where different web cultures and business environments can be compared, perhaps in search of some universal success strategies across the Asian web industry.

I think language is one hurdle but I think English will end up being the defacto language of such an event.  More importantly is location, sponsorship and organization.  That will be the challenge.  Japan only had a “Web 2.0″ event in 2007 (many years after the first “Web 2.0″ event in the US) and the Japan event was very different than any of the US ones.

I would be happy to see such an event happen and would do what I could to make it happen, but I think finding an appropriate site, an organizer and anchor sponsors is critical (and a full-time job for a team of people.)  Even if discussions started today, 2008 may be too early for such an event (if the goal is to make a very large event.)  I look forward to such an event but I don’t see any of the current incumbents (event organization incumbents) stepping forward for such an event.

As web browser diversity broadens both on mobile and the desktop, web site compatibility and support of open web standards are more and more important.

In light of the non-compatibility of many websites in Asia outside of Internet Explorer, an open source software promotion forum funded by the governments of China, Japan and Korea have pooled resources to prepare a report that extensively reports on the discrepancies in web interoperability looking at the dominant browser (Internet Explorer) and the leading open source browser (Firefox.) This is not necessarily new information per se, but it is information that was compiled by web experts from China, Japan and Korea.

The foreword of the report states:

NEAOSS Forum (Northeast Asia Open Source Software promotion Forum) was formed by China, Korea and Japan governments and regional organizations for OSS promotion; China OSS Promotion Union, Korea OSS Promotion Forum and Japan OSS Promotion Forum. The Forum intends to promote Open Source Software in the northeast Asia area. NEAOSS Forum formed “WG3: Standardization and Certification Study” in order to study Open Source Software standardization and certification in July 2004. NEAOSS Forum WG3 formed subsidiary group SWG2 in June 2006 to accelerate promotion of OSS, to enhance Web interoperability between an existing proprietary browser, which currently has large market share, and OSS Web browsers. This document was prepared by the NEAOSS Forum WG3 and is classified as Technical Report type 3.

Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum Working Group 3 - Report of Web interoperability discrepancy (pdf)

Abstract: This technical report is to identify current situation of Web interoperability and to provide information to public. By figuring out and classifying the Web interoperability discrepancies, this report provides the foundation of further research.

The summary of the report states:

There are total 168 discrepancies reported in the survey. The result of this survey, however, does not reveal all discrepancies between IE and Firefox. It is impossible to gather all discrepancies because this laborious work is similar to fixing all bugs of software.

… (long list of incompatibilities)

It is important that Web developer make their Web content with opened [sic] and widely used format to be accessed by many users.

I am often asked about web site compatibility in Japan or Asia. While this report only covers China, Japan and Korea, it is a clear indication that website compatibility has a long way to go in North East Asia. As the report says, it is “the foundation of further research.”

The AP is reporting that Microsoft has stopped appealing the anti-trust suit it lost in South Korea in 2005. The official decision is available for download here.

The ruling imposed a multimillion dollar (euro) fine imposed on the U.S. software maker for unfair business practices and required Microsoft to provide two separate versions of Windows, one stripped of the Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger and the other carrying links to Web pages that allow consumers to download competing versions of such software.

This is an important decision for the Korean Fair Trade Commission.  Let’s hope that the KFTC takes seriously the new concerns around the defacto monopoly of the web in South Korea.

Microsoft wants to drop antitrust appeal in South Korea - International Herald Tribune