DS: What's the Linux angle on what you're up to with OSAF.
MK: Linux is a huge inspiration.
DS: Tell me more about that.
MK: Well, one could hardly fail to notice Linux. (laughter)
DS: Like that old George Carlin routine, where he plays Joe Sleet the HippyDippy Weather Man. He says "We've got a line of thunderstorms over here, but also a flock of ICBMs coming in, so I wouldn't sweat the thundershowers."
MK: (laughter) Exactly.
My personal path was.. I was at Accel Partners when they invested in Eazel. Before that I was a aware of Linux, but because I'm a desktop guy, and Linux was not desktop friendly at all at that point, I wasn't paying special attention to it. So Eazel happened, and I knew the Eazel guys, because they had been at Apple. That's also how I saw how difficult it would be to build venture-scale businesses around it.
So I was thinking about it, and I got introduced to Linus by a mutual friend. We had lunch, and it was pretty darn inspiring. Because when you think about it, and put a business hat on, the idea that Linux could start as this little hobby project that would in the course of less than a decade become this extremely popular piece of software that people would bet on for mission critical applications...how did that happen? Nobody is in charge of it. Nobody owns it. It's not controlled by a corporation. It fundamentally depends on cooperation and collaboration. Put in perspective, it's an amazing model of how to get stuff done. And very inspiring. It provided a clue to me about how I was going to get back into software.
Becuase I was stymied. I like to do productivity applications. That's what I do. Stuff people use every day. But we had market inertia, for a variety of reasons. Micrsoft dominance. Plus the fact that large enterprises weren't terribly interested in any opportunities there.
Open source, my takeaway, when I started this, was, if you could build something initially that begins to get traction, that builds communities of use and participation, the leverage from open source is enormous. You can move mountains with a relatively modest amount of resources compared to what it would take to do in a corporate model. So I said, fabulous. And thought a lot about the fact that I wanted to do applications, not infrastructure. A lot of people in the open source world are actually sort of geeky about applications.
DS: What do you mean by geeky?
MK: They're not really interested in the ordinary person's experience trying to use a computer to get something done. That culture is not going to produce killer applications.
DS: But in the beginning that was the culture, and the kind of work, that naturally accretes around what Linus was doing.
MK: Yes.
DS: But there is a high-touch culture as well. And I think some of those were like you, mostly in the commercial world, looking for a place to relocate their passions.
MK: That's right. It's been a revelation how much good will is coming back at us, and how many people want to help in a wide variety of capacities. They're saying, "Wow, there really ought to be something like this and I'm glad you guys are doing it, and it sounds like, from what I've seen so far, you guys are really on the right track, and how can I help?"
DS: Are you putting any of Andy Herzfeld's Helix work to use?
MK: Not the code itself, but the approaches and ideas and things that he worked on will fesurface as well. We have five developers on board, including Andy, who is a volunteer. He has been principally responsible for developing our prototype, called Vista. He wrote the front end code for that. He has also been a principal in brainstroming and design meetings -- really every aspect of the project.
DS: Let's talk about where the market is going. On last week's Geek Cruise, there seemed to be a lot of consensus around the notion that a bunch of stuff is getting commoditized, fast. And LInux has a lot to do with that. The result in hardware will be a $200 commodity desktop. What about applications?
MK: I am convinced that, with or without OSAF, the existing class of applicaitons like Microsoft Office will be fully commoditized and free within five years. To the point when it will make no difference to users whatsoever.
DS: So you agree with the big-picture view that the success of Microsoft has been historically interesting but somewhat anomalous in the long run, and --
MK: -- They'll have to make their money doing something else.
DS: Yoz Grahame calls Chandler the second coming of Agenda. Do you feel that way about it?
MK: Yes I do. The spirit of Agenda is going to animate Chandler. But it's the spirit, not the flesh. Still, Agenda users, and for that matter Echo users, should be very happy with what we do, certainly by release 2. The reason I say that is that we have to get basic email and calendar and contact management just so -- so that existing organizations are willing to migrate. We have to solve importing all the data, and a lot of problems, in order to get acceptance and adoption. We want an impact, and given finite resources some specialized Agenda features won't make the first cut. But we will get there.
DS:
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.