wild 1995

Chapter 92 Preparation
On March 3th, Di Ye showed Manager Wu a dozen business cards of lawyers. Although he was just trying to scare him, every business card was real, because after he came to Hong Kong, he visited many law firms in order to establish a foundation and draft an open source agreement.

""Draft Charter of the Little Red Flower Open Source Foundation"...Little Red Flower License..."

""Little Red Flower Knowledge Sharing Foundation Draft Charter"...Little Red Flower Knowledge Sharing Agreement..."

Di Ye carefully read the two bilingual legal documents, and said to lawyer Hu of McKenzie Law Firm in English: "I need to study these two drafts again. What does Pujiang say about the license and the knowledge sharing agreement?"

McKenzie Law Firm is a multinational company established in Chicago, USA in 1949. It opened offices in Hong Kong and Pujiang in 1974 and 1993. It is more convenient to deal with legal issues at home and abroad. Based on this consideration, Di Ye chose to let this law firm draft documents for himself.

"The Pujiang office believes that the Xiaohonghua license and the Xiaohonghua knowledge sharing agreement are theoretically in line with the "Copyright Law" issued by Mainland China in 1990, but it is difficult to implement."

"As long as it complies with the law, it will be resolved slowly after implementation."

Seeing that Di Ye had no other orders, Lawyer Hu stood up, nodded to Professor Luo who was sitting next to him, and then said, "Mr. Di, I will take my leave first. If you need anything, you can call me anytime."

"Walk slowly."

Di Ye sent Lawyer Hu to the door, then returned to the reception room, changed to Mandarin, and complained to Professor Luo: "Dealing with lawyers is very troublesome. Every word must be studied carefully, which is more tiring than writing code."

Professor Luo is about 40 years old, his hairline has receded to the top of his head, and his forehead looks very wide. He was born and raised in Sichuan Province. He came to Hong Kong with his parents to settle down in the 60s. He speaks with a strong local accent. He empathizes: "Lawyers in Hong Kong are all like this, it's disgusting."

"Although I hate it, I can't use it."

"Yes Yes."

Professor Luo was not good at words. After chatting dryly for a few words, he pointed to the legal documents on the table and said, "Mr. Di, although these two foundations have good intentions, it is a pity that they are not profitable. I am afraid that there are not many people who support you. You must do what you can."

Di Ye smiled slightly and said, "I will."

Both foundations have prototypes. The former is the Apache Software Foundation established in 1999, which is applicable to the computer field, and the latter is Creative Commons, which was established in 2001. It is applicable to academic papers, literature, music, movies, teaching materials and other fields, and is a derivative of the concept of open source.

As for the name Xiaohonghua, firstly, because the panda Xiaohonghua is becoming more and more powerful, and most of the codes and documents are completed by it; secondly, because the Xiaohonghua license is actually the Apache protocol 2004 released in 2.0, which is permanently licensed, free to use, and open source is not mandatory after modification. You only need to keep the original author’s statement and explain the modified source code.

The Creative Commons agreement is more complicated and can be combined into a variety of different forms of authorization, such as signature only (BY), signature + non-commercial use (BY-NC), signature-no derivation (BY-ND) and so on.

Di Ye actually has the original text of the Apache Protocol 2.0 and the Creative Commons Protocol 4.0 in his memory, but because these two agreements are very strict and require a lot of legal knowledge, it is unreasonable for him, a computer science student, to write them out, so he can only find a law firm in Hong Kong to go through the motions and draft the foundation's charter by the way.

The prototypes of these two foundations are very loose, resulting in inefficiency. The Apache Foundation even has a joke called a garbage collection station. Therefore, Di Ye has made a lot of changes according to his own interests to make it more centralized. Naturally, the charter must be revised accordingly.

"Professor Luo, the construction of the official websites of these two foundations, as well as the maintenance of the official website of the browser, will be entrusted to you for a while."

"Mr. Di donated so much equipment to our Department of Computing, it should be."

Professor Luo is an honest person. After speaking, he took out a dozen CDs from his backpack and said, "These are the collection of open source software on our school's mirror resource server. I hope it will be helpful to your research and development projects."

"Thank you, Professor Luo, for your help."

Di Ye’s excuse for coming to Hong Kong this time was to create the official website of the browser, but there was no website hosting service provider in Hong Kong at this time. He felt that renting an office, buying servers, and hiring employees were too troublesome, so he went to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and donated equipment worth 100 million Hong Kong dollars to the Department of Computing. After that, he signed a cooperation agreement to temporarily store the official website on the school’s network server.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University cooperated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993 to set up a mirror server to collect various open source software. Di Ye discovered these things that night, so he asked Professor Luo to help burn them into CDs, and prepared to take them back as teaching and reference materials.

At 3:14 pm on March 5th, Di Ye and Xia's brothers and sisters returned to Pengcheng with a full load.

That night, Di Ye checked the results of the R&D team and found that they had submitted tens of thousands of lines of code and upgraded the version control software to more than a dozen minor versions. Although it was all tinkering work, it made it more convenient and easy to use, and the codes also conformed to the specifications.

"Mr. Hua, before developing it, let's give this version control software an official name."

"That's right, Mr. Hua, the current name of this thing is AAA, and it was you who played it at random."

Di Ye's screen name is LRF, which is the abbreviation of Little Red Flowers in English. Because he posted a lot of jokes and spoofs on Cfido after the Spring Festival, he was dubbed "Sao Hua" by netizens.

Xia Fangfei likes Lenovo, and feels that her name and flowers are a natural match, so she likes the name Hua Zong very much, and suggested with a smile: "This software will be handed over to the Little Red Flower Open Source Foundation to be responsible for maintenance. The English name of the Little Red Flower Foundation is Azalea, which means azalea. Why not name it after a flower."

This centralized version control software is overused, and it will definitely be replaced by a distributed one like git in the future, so Di Ye didn't want to waste the dozen or so brand names he registered, and said, "Then name it with a flower, and you all come up with one."

A group of people debated for a long time, and finally the "oleander" proposed by Su Zhaonian won the victory, because there are many oleanders near the community, which are blooming these days, which is very beautiful. In addition, his reason is also very convincing: "Oleander is poisonous, it can remind us to be careful when submitting code, and don't mess around."

Xia Fangfei added a reason for him, saying: "There is only one word in English for oleander, which is called Oleander. The flower language represents friendship and caution. I think it's pretty good."

"Then use that name."

After discussing the name of the version control software, a group of people started to name the browser while the iron was hot. This time, Di Ye did not let them play freely, and directly announced: "I have already named the browser. The Chinese name is Sulong, and the English name is Athlon. The domain name has been registered, and it will be launched tomorrow."

"what?!"

"Why is it called Athlon? It sounds weird."

"Athlon is pretty good. Now that the internet speed is so slow, I really need a faster browser."

In 1995, the internet speed was indeed very slow. Di Yehua’s 8 yuan monthly DDN dedicated line had a network speed of only 64K, which was shared by more than a dozen people. The speed can be imagined, so netizens have high requirements for the speed of their browsers.

However, Di Ye’s purpose of plagiarizing AMD’s classic CPU brand is not to pursue browser response speed. After all, even if the code is optimized 3 times, it is not as reliable as telecom companies replacing copper cables with optical fibers. Therefore, the word “speed” in Athlon refers to R&D speed. He wants to use extremely high R&D efficiency to overwhelm W[-]C, defeat the current Netscape and future IE, and unify web standards.

Traveling from 2023 to 1995, in addition to mastering the information and knowledge advantages, Di Ye has another advantage, that is, efficiency. He has become accustomed to working in "hours", while others are still working in "days" or "weeks", which is particularly slow.

"Go back to rest early tonight. Starting tomorrow, I will let you not even have time to go to the toilet."

(End of this chapter)