[Fsf-friends] INTRODUCING: Hong Feng... of China

Mon Oct 20 09:51:47 IST 2003

SELF-INTRO OF Hong Feng... interesting to see what others in Asia are 
upto. FN
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My name is Hong Feng. I was born in 1968 in HuNan          
Province, China.                                           

After graduated from my university, I'd studied            
mathematics and Pansystems Methodology after the theory    
founder, Prof. Wu XueMou, in Wuhan during 1988-1991. In    
1992-1995, I visited Russia and stayed in Moscow. I was    
greatly impressed by the Russian social reforms.           

I founded RON's Datacom Co., Ltd. with other 2 people in   
May 1995 when I returned from Russia. Since then, I have   
been exploring how to build a successful business model on 
the basis of free software (which has wrongly been called  
as "open sources software" since 1998 in the public media  
and by part of the community). Free software is so         
interesting, I have been enthusiastically promoting it in  
China for years.                                           

During 1997-1999, I had worked as the chief editor at      
O'Reilly & Associates in Beijing. It is an American        
publisher of computer books. During that time, I           
translated several books from English into Chinese. But I  
no longer effort any proprietary publications in the 21st  
Century.                                                   

In my spare time, I like reading books on various topics,  
especially philosophy and history (I should admit I am too 
bookish); travelling to some places with beautiful nature  
scenes (one of the places I dream to visit someday is the  
Kamchatka in Russia); collecting some Chinese traditional  
style paintings and Russian paintings; swimming in natural 
rivers and lakes (especially the Han River near my Wuhan   
home in the summer); and watching the soccer matches.      

I am a true music fan! I like to play harmonica            
(mouthorgan) and Spanish guitar. Now I make some excises   
with a common saw and a bow (that's a quite new invented   
music instrument. The voice is a little bit like that of a 
Hawaiian guitar).                                          

I admire and respect a few famous scholars, including:     

                                         * H. Poincare                                            
                                         * G. Cantor                                              
                                         * A. Einstein                                            
                                         * B. Russell                                             
                                         * E. Brouwer                                             
                                         * D. Hilbert                                             
                                         * K. Goedel                                              
                                         * A. Robinson                                            

I like some poems too, two poets I like the most are Mao   
ZeDong, and Heinrich Heine because the poems of both in    
their youth, are quite romantic, but became more           
revolutionary and less romantic later. My most favorite    
author is Isaac Asimov, for his unmatchable imagination    
and high productivity in such high quality.                

I do not like to follow any sort of so-called              
"authorities", which forbid my freedom and the             
independency. I believe the intrinsics of the nature is a  
"regret" caused by uncompleteness.                         

I have a baby named "MNM Project" (MNM's Not a Million),   
who is 2 years old now. I am taking care of him to protect 
my freedom! A large part of the project is Hackerdom       
Training Program (HTP) going on now.                       

I am a freelance writer, the author of 4 books, including  
"Free Software: New Game Rules". I am also the publisher   
of FREE SOFTWARE Magazine (FSM). Till now, it is the only  
free (the ``free'' in freedom) monthly periodical devoted  
to the global free software community. It has both a web   
version and a paper version; both are free to copy and     
redistribute.                                              

I am still writing a biography for my friend, Richard      
Stallman (the Chinese title of the book is "RMS BenJi")    
who is the Chairman and one of the founders of Free        
Software Foundation. It is a hard project, as I try to     
unleash the technical details of his software in Part II   
of the book. I would like to write more biographies into   
the BenJi series for free books (as a part of MNM          
Project).                                                  

To publish the free books in Chinese, I need to have a set 
of nice free fonts. I am designing high quality, free      
PostScript fonts in METAPOST. Since Chinese has thousands  
of characters to design, this project is still undergoing. 
PostScript specification is open, and widely supported by  
the publishing industry. GNU has a tool, "Ghostscript",    
which can interpret PostScript files; it is also a         
stack-based programming language. Because the typesetting  
is so fun, I founded the Chinese TeX User Group (CTUG) in  
2000, which aims to promote Prof. Donald Knuth's TeX       
system for the community.                                  

As a programmer, I like some programming languages,        
including Lisp, (Objective) C and assembly. Now I heavily  
work with Scheme for hacking and training. Scheme is a     
modern dialect of Lisp, quite small yet very powerful      
indeed (I shall say it is RMS who showed me the power and  
elegance of Lisp). Maybe you like it too and are           
interested in joining my MNM Project?                      

   You can reach me by snail           
   address:                            

   Suite 3-3, WuZhong Street 200,      
   DongXiHu District, Wuhan,           
   HuBei Province,                     
   430040 China P.R.                   

   Or, electronically by email:        
   info@mail.rons.net.cn to feedback   
   your comment to the web page.       