Mitch Kapor bails on the Chandler project
I guess it was just a matter of determining how long Mitch Kapor's patience would last, since he has enough money to fuel a dead project for a loooonnnggggg time.
He fed Chandler and the Open Source Applications Foundation for six years on the premise that it would deliver a mind-blowingly innovative PIM (personal information management) suite.
Mitch Kapor
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET News.com)Six years later, Chandler just blows.
OSAF announced this week that Kapor is leaving and taking his funding with him. It's about time.
Kapor--the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the founding chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, and the chairman of Linden Labs--certainly can find other things to do.
OSAF wasn't a bad idea, and Chandler wasn't either. But neither was managed particularly well. Time to move on.
The best communal open-source projects are run like Mozilla (strong core development team with easy pluggability from the outside), Eclipse (cohesive corporate involvement to create a common core while competing at the edges--come to think of it, Linux is like this too), or Apache (strong technology brand that allows for a wide range of experimentation).
Chandler had none of this. It had a strong, inward-looking development team that never really got beyond itself.
That's a recipe for failure in open source. And thus, Chandler has failed.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Yeah it was *incredibly* frustrating to watch. Some very smart people and some others I would say... not so much. But in the end it really was a failure of leadership. Its amazing when you see people just running off the edge of the road at 100mph with no guard rail. Very disturbing to watch. You want to look away. RIP
Hank
Maybe Kapor leaving and Chandler becoming truly community-fed it will give it the boost it couldn't get when it was cash-fed.