...more recent posts
Is Mitch Kapor going to save us all? You'd think so by the response to his latest project announcement: an open source personal information manager.
Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler), is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with others, we might call Chandler the first Interpersonal Information Manager. (The term PIM was first used in conjunction with the product Lotus Agenda in the 1980's. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a common designer in Mitch Kapor.)Mitch has a blog where he talks about what they are doing.
We are trying to make a PIM which is substantive enough and enticing enough to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using, which statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook.If you've ever talked to a business person about switching to unix from microsoft you already know that Outlook is what maintains the monopoly. (Well, OK, Excel and Powerpoint too, but those are easier to deal with.)
Dan Gilmore has a good non technical article that ends with this bit of profound understatement: "This is potentially a big deal."
I think people are going to cast this as the big showdown. Can open source really slay goliath? Or at least give him a bad case of heartburn? The geeks are tripping over themselves to get on board ("Oy am I drooling over the ProductManagement job enough to almost wish I lived out West...." Bill Seitz; "Just look at the architecture and feature list. I must be dreaming! This is way too good to be true!" Aaron Swartz.)
Not only will the entire code base be open source, but it's going to be built with just about every ultra hip open source technology, including python, ZODB, Jabber, RDF, and parts of the mozilla project.
This looks like a really important showdown in the final struggle. Will you control the details of your digital life, or will your digital future be locked into someone else's plan for world domination? Go Mitch!
Lots of people linking to todays Doonesbury. But this isn't the first mention of blogs, I remember blogging this one almost two months ago. Still, this one is more subject matter than mention.