After a pitiful few years of almost no innovation in the software industry, there are a few small signs of intelligent life rustling in the underbrush. Movable Type and pMachine are both groundbreaking low-end content management systems, for example, that allow non-technical individuals and small workgroups publish interactively on the web with a minimal effort on the technical side. Because the content is stored in an open and easily-accessible format, no lock-in occurs.
Mitch Kapor is leading a team intent on developing what they’re calling an “interpersonal information manager,” under the codename “Chandler.” It’s really an open source Microsoft Outlook killer, and Kapor is documenting his development activities on his weblog.
Ordinarily I’d dismiss product hyperbole for non-existent software as pure vaporware, but this is, after all, Mitch Kapor. Yeah, that Mitch Kapor. The guy who designed the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and dropped everything to help get the Electronic Frontier Foundation off the ground.
The Chandler feature summary reads like you’d expect, except that Kapor’s team is wisely working with open and net-tested standards, formats, and protocols including Jabber, iCal, vCard, and RDF. Of course Chandler will run on all major computing platforms, yada, yada, yada.
None of this is what makes Chandler especially interesting.
What makes Chandler interesting is Kapor’s business plan and target market.
Kapor has created a non-profit foundation, the Open Source Application Foundation, as a vehicle to develop an innovative business plan. While committing up to US$5 million of his own money, Kapor intends to solicit sponsorships—similar to the public broadcasting model in the United States—and license parts of Chandler as a development platform upon which commercial developers can build their applications. Dan Gillmor refers to the plan as “a socially conscious, post-bubble strategy,” and quotes Kapor as saying his intent is “to have an impact and be self-sustaining, not to generate revenue, profits, and a high market capitalization.”
Especially interesting is that Kapor and company are developing specifically for the individual user. Instead of kowtowing to corporate IT departments, they’re ignoring the enterprise completely and leaving it to the commercial developers.
Finally after far too long, there are at least three signs that the development community is getting tired of chasing the tires of the corporate market, talking about sustainability instead of market capitalization, and becoming interested in serving individual users again.
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