I ran into him at a conference, and we got to talking, and I was able to make this thing happen. And we brokered an arrangement to spin Mozilla out into its own non-profit. So that was a year and a half ago.
You also have two of your own foundations.
Oh, at least. I'm almost entirely working on the non-profit side. There's the Open Source Applications Foundation and the Mitchell Kapor Foundation. Then there's also the Level Playing Field Institute.
Let me ask you about what's going on at the Open Source Applications Foundation. What are you doing with Chandler?
Chandler is a personal information manager whose principle functions are e-mail and calendar. It also has some contact, address and task management.
One of the goals for Chandler all along has been to start with more of a clean sheet of paper in how we design the application. The other alternative is to do something more conventional that looks and works more or less like Outlook. There's nothing wrong with that, but as I was saying before, one of the goals is to see if we could innovate to improve the user experience in fundamental ways. We will either fail or succeed in how well we do with that goal.
Apart from writing this thing from the ground up, what are your larger strategic goals for Chandler?
In the same way that Firefox has established itself as very viable open-source browser alternative, one strategic goal would be to establish another alternative in another important software applications category -- a viable open-source alternative that has the potential, as it matures, to reach ultimately millions of people and a developer community of thousands. Those are goals which we will get to in several stages, not all at once.
In terms of the e-mail and the calendar components, Chandler sounds a lot like what Mozilla is already doing with Thunderbird and Sunbird. Aren't your open-source foundations stepping on each other's toes?
It's absolutely in the same category as Thunderbird. Sunbird is an existing community calendar, which is basic and not complete or robust. They're using that as a base, adding a lot of things to it and integrating that with Thunderbird.
The aspiration level of Sunbird, by everyone's account, is significantly more modest and different than what we're trying to do in Chandler. We're trying to provide a well-engineered, well-designed but vanilla IMAP client and some vanilla calendaring. But when I was talking about overcoming information silos and better integration between the different kinds of data that a PIM manages -- that's a Chandler aspiration. In Outlook, your data is in separate silos when often you'd like to see things much better connected.
The Mitchell Kapor Foundation and the Level Playing Field Initiative are both concerned with social, environmental and educational issues. When it comes to those issues, how would you rate the high-tech industry as a whole?
It's pretty mixed. It's difficult and dangerous to make enormous generalisations. You'll find a number of progressive corporations that stand up for social responsibility, and tech companies are not like mining or these extractive industries that are wreaking enormous environmental damage.
At the same time, I'd say there's still a kind of Silicon Valley attitude that doesn't take its corporate responsibilities seriously. They say, "We help people get rich, and they should decide in their private lives what kind of philanthropy to support." That's irresponsible.
If you're running a business, you have employees, and that comes with very basic responsibilities to be a good citizen. That's not a mainstream attitude in the technology industry.
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