Mitch Kapor & the Globalization of Open-Source
 Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corp. and the creator of two of the most innovative PC programs ever, Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Agenda. Until recently a venture capitalist, Kapor has formed a new company with the goal of creating an open-source personal information manager that would combine the functionality of Microsoft Outlook with Agenda. The thing could be killer. Although Agenda was discontinued by Lotus back in 1992, I still use it today for tasks that no other application can handle.
Why is Kapor doing this? Because -- as this scathing piece by the Merc's Dan Gillmor makes clear -- Microsoft is sucking all the oxygen out of the software ecosystem. Independent commercial software innovation on the Intel desktop has essentially ceased. Gillmor has a few interesting things to say about the $40 billion in cash that Microsoft is sitting on, too. Funny how Microsoft pays no dividends to shareholders.
Apple, meanwhile, is itself leveraging the already huge amount of fine open-source application software that is available for the asking. Because of the Unix underpinnings of OS X, most of this software will run on Apple's computers, something that was impossible only a year ago, before OS X was introduced. Courtesy of the wonderful Fink project, I myself am using on all my favorite Linux apps -- including, of course, GNU Emacs, about which I've written here and here -- by running an X Server and Gnome right on Apple's Aqua desktop.
Meanwhile, the government of India is borrowing a page from China's book to strike its own blow against the empire. With the two largest countries in the world choosing to embrace Linux and do open battle against the Microsoft monopoly, efforts like Kapor's and Apple's do not look nearly so quixotic.
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