wild 1995

Chapter 97 Change
Mark Anderson went to New York on March 3 to participate in the IPO promotion event held by Goldman Sachs, and spent a few days living a luxurious life. It was not until March 17 when he returned to the Netscape headquarters in Mountain View that he saw Di Ye replying to his email.

"WebP image format? Looks good..."

"Use a special mechanism to store user information? It seems to be a bit like the cookie that Lou Monterey researched..."

"TSL security protocol? WTF!"

After reading the email, Mark Anderson felt like he had seen a ghost, and his whole body was in a bad mood. He immediately picked up the phone and called Michael Toy, asking, "Has the company's file server been hacked recently? I mean hacking through the Internet."

"Did you drink too much last night, are you still hungover? The file server is not connected to the Internet, how to hack?"

"You come to my place, no, you call Jamie, Lu, and Scott into the conference room, and I will be there in 5 minutes."

"Mark, what's going on?"

"Don't ask, you'll find out later."

Anderson hung up the phone, printed a few copies of Dino's email, then hurriedly took the elevator downstairs, ran to the meeting room of the R&D department, and distributed it while introducing: "This is the content of the email that LRF, the developer of the Athlon browser, sent me 3 days ago. He is researching almost the same technology as ours."

Jamie Zawinski, a hippie with long hair dyed blue at the ends, looks very cool. He took the printer paper and complained: "Mark, you should have taken out the LRF email earlier. The beta version of the Athlon browser is updated every day, and now the function is almost exactly the same as our Netscape 1.0."

Michael Toy was also dissatisfied, saying: "LRF released a server software called Tengyun 3 days ago, which is also based on HTTPd, but he rewritten all the code, which is lighter, more stable and easier to use than ours."

Anderson was slightly taken aback, and said: "HTTPd was developed by McCool, how could he write better than McCool?"

"Mark, you haven't written code for a long time, have you forgotten to refactor? If you tear down an old house and rebuild it, even if the appearance is exactly the same, the internal structure will become more reasonable."

Anderson laughed twice, sat down in the middle of the conference table, and said to Lou Monterey, who was wearing an afro on his left, "Lou, look at the middle part. LRF is developing a technology for storing user information, which is very similar to the cookie you proposed."

"I'm watching."

Anderson turned his head and said to the bald Scott Collins on the right: "Scott, LRF is developing a secure network protocol, very similar to SSL that your group is working on."

"SSL requires high cryptography attainments, and I don't think he can do it."

As the R&D director, Toy puts more emphasis on the WebP image format. Pointing to the data on the printed paper, he said: "If this format is as good as he said, we should support it as soon as possible, otherwise the server users will be snatched away, because it can not only help the website save more traffic, but also avoid paying patent fees."

"WebP is indeed better than JPEG and GIF. Many people on the Internet call it GIF Killer, similar to our Mozilla."

When Netscape was developing the Netscape browser last year, in order to boost morale, the project was codenamed Mozilla, which means Mosaic killer. As a result, it was realized in just over two months, so the codename became a good talk and a symbol of the company's culture.

"Mark, is LRF willing to come and work in our company?"

"He refused, saying he wanted to stay in China to study for a doctorate."

A few days ago, Toy had reservations about inviting Di Ye to work at Netscape, but now he became proactive, saying, "Maybe your salary is too low. Chinese people like to use this kind of excuse to increase their status."

Zawinski raised the printing paper in his hand and shook it, saying: "LRF doesn't need this kind of excuse, because he is very rich, and just donated 100 million US dollars to the Little Red Flower Open Source Foundation and the Little Red Flower Knowledge Sharing Foundation the day before yesterday."

"These two foundations were founded by him, right?"

"Yes, but the donated funds are managed by a trust in Hong Kong."

"He actually has so much money, are his parents billionaires?"

"I don't know, there is too little information about him on the Internet."

At this time, Scott Collins read the content about TSL in the email, put on a bitter and bitter expression, and said: "Mark, you must invite LRF over, because according to his theory, the SSL 2.0 we are studying now still has many security problems and needs to be redesigned again."

Lou Monterey agreed and echoed: "LRF believes that the problem of cookie insecurity can be solved through sessions, but it did not explain the specific process. We should invite him to come over for a technical exchange. He is an open source project and should not refuse."

Anderson has no objection to inviting Di Ye to do technical exchanges, but he has doubts and always feels that something is wrong. He reminded: "The development progress of LRF is so close to ours, don't you find it strange?"

Toy disapproved and said, "Mark, he is separated from us by the Pacific Ocean. Unless there is telepathy, it can only be a coincidence. I am more curious about how he mastered so much knowledge. Image compression, cryptography, network programming, and layout rendering are all not easy."

"Either he's a genius or he hired a team."

"Bet $10, he has a team."

"I think he's a genius, bet you."

Seeing that a few people didn't care much, Anderson suppressed his uneasiness and said, "I'll write a reply letter to LRF and ask him when it's convenient for him to come to the United States."

Zawinski did not take part in the gamble, but kept reading the contents of the email. He raised his head and broke the news: "Perry has already invited LRF, and he will come to the United States in May."

"Perry? Why did he invite LRF?"

"Perry works in the GNN online bookstore under O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly was very interested in the knowledge sharing agreement proposed by LRF and asked Perry to contact him to come to the United States for a seminar."

Perry refers to Wei Peiyuan, a Chinese computer expert who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he wrote a browser called ViolaWWW. It had many innovations in technology and design, such as supporting external program calls, adding "forward" and "back" buttons on the interface, etc. It was very popular at the time. When Mark Anderson and others developed Mosic, they used it as a reference template, so they kept in touch.

O'Reilly Media is one of the most well-known computer book publishers in the world. It was founded by Tim O'Reilly in 1978. It has published a large number of computer books with animals as the cover, commonly known as "animal books". There are more than 800 books translated into Chinese. Almost all programmers in the 21st century in China have bought or read some.

Tim O'Reilly is known for his trendy thinking and unique vision. After trying ViolaWWW in 1992, he hired Wei Peiyuan as the technical director and created the world's first business website GNN, which is mainly engaged in online reading business, several years earlier than Amazon.

When Mark Anderson was in a meeting at Netscape headquarters to discuss Di Ye, a man in downtown San Francisco, about 50 minutes away from Mountain View, was reading an email that Di Ye had written to him.

This person's name is Brian Behlendorf, who also graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. In October last year, he helped the famous technology magazine "Connection" create the official website hotwired, and then sold the world's first web banner advertisement.

In the next few months, Behlendorf has been helping various companies or institutions to create official websites. The server software of the website is HTTPd. Due to lack of maintenance, it often breaks down. Therefore, he took the lead in setting up an email group to patch HTTPd in ​​his spare time, and then named the group Apache with a homonym.

During the patching process, Behlendorf and several members of the mail team worked together to refactor about 70% of HTTPd's code, and it was about to be completed. As a result, a mature product called "Tengyun" suddenly appeared on the Internet, and its performance was better than their Apache in all aspects.

Behlendorf didn't feel much disappointed about this, but was very happy with Tengyun's appearance, because patching HTTPd is a very cumbersome task, and he has long been impatient. Now that there are alternatives, he can finally let go and concentrate on building websites to make money.

On March 3th, Behlendorf received an email signed by LRF, inviting him to serve as the chief operating officer of the Tengyun open source project, responsible for promotion in North America, with an annual salary of $20.

Although the annual salary is relatively low, this is an open source project that can earn a reputation and is perfectly compatible with the current business, which is equivalent to a windfall for nothing. Therefore, after reading it, Behlendorf replied to the email without hesitation and accepted the job invitation.

The next morning, when Di Ye saw the email, he muttered softly, "Farewell, Apache."

(End of this chapter)