Mozilla and China

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.