Software knight Kapor takes up new quest

SAN FRANCISCO -- Mitch Kapor, sleeves rolled up, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, peers at parcels of software code projected on a screen in a darkened conference room. It's just past 11 on a rainy Thursday morning, and Kapor looks every bit the high-tech mastermind prodding his young proteges.

Surrounding him are 20 developers in T-shirts and jeans, slouched in their chairs pecking away on laptops. It's the weekly meeting of Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation, and Kapor is pressing the team to accelerate its work in advance of an important demo. Four dogs doze under a conference table, while a fifth stretches in the lap of its owner, licking her face, as Kapor peppers his presenters with questions and scribbles notes on a yellow legal pad.

''There's nothing like surfacing issues," he says.

Kapor (pronounced kay-pore), 54, who founded Cambridge's Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and grew it into what for a time was the world's largest software company, is back in the business after a 15-year hiatus. His new project, code-named Chandler, aims to do for e-mail and calendar functions what Firefox did for Web browsing: persuade tens of millions of ordinary computer users to abandon the Microsoft software bundled into their Windows operating systems and download a free ''open source" application. It's not a task undertaken lightly, and its success will hinge on offering people a product that is less frustrating and more useful and intuitive than the one they are using.

Few know the costs of competing with Bill Gates as well as Kapor does. His cherished Lotus ultimately was overtaken by Microsoft. But, despite the long odds against Microsoft challengers, he exudes a Zen-like calm. Studying an image of a Chandler calendar interface with overlapping color blocks, Kapor perks up. ''It's striking when you add a feature with a big visual side," he says. ''That's clearly going to help the demo-ability."

Chandler, scheduled for its first consumer release this fall, is the latest in a series of open source initiatives that seek to capitalize on the momentum of Firefox and reshape the computing landscape. Kapor is bankrolling some of these efforts with $5.3 million of his own money. His nonprofit foundation, known as OSAF, and the Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, Calif., of which he is chairman, are readying crossover applications that, for the first time, are appealing to a mass market.

''This is the first wave in the assault on the home desktop," said Walter Wright, managing director of the Boston law firm Rich May, which represents technology companies. ''Chandler is getting people talking about how open source can be delivered to regular people. It may be that Kapor's greatest contribution won't be just deploying Chandler but catalyzing open source across the globe."

Mozilla's Firefox caught on last year partly because its release coincided with security problems with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft since has upgraded its browser to address those problems as part of a campaign against open source, the free computer software emerging as an alternative to proprietary products. Open source software is created collaboratively, with programmers sharing improvements within a community. Its source code is freely available to the general public for use or modification, but any changes made to the software also must be offered free to the public.

Until now, open source software has made most of its inroads in the business market. Other than hard-core techies, most consumers have shied away, fearing it could prove too demanding. But in the aftermath of Firefox, that may be changing. ''If it solves an issue in people's lives, and it's free and easy to install, then you've got a winner," said Geoff Johnston, analyst for the WebSideStory research firm in Phoenix. ''But a lot of people are lazy. If they're running a Microsoft application and it's working, they're not going to change."

Microsoft isn't betting on change. Even before Kapor's product is formally released, officials at the Redmond, Wash., software behemoth compare it unfavorably with their e-mail and calendar program, which is ubiquitous in business. ''The reality is that Chandler does not offer an equivalent comparison to Microsoft Office Outlook," said Dan Leach, product manager at Microsoft's information worker group.

In returning to his software roots, Kapor is coming full circle after decades of reinventing himself: radio disc jockey, computer programmer, transcendental meditation teacher, mental health counselor, high-tech entrepreneur, online civil liberties advocate, professor of Internet and democracy at MIT's Media Lab, angel investor, philanthropist, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

Kapor's most celebrated incarnation was at Lotus, where he was one of the early knights of the computer revolution. Working with Jonathan Sachs, he created Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet program that propelled the personal computer business. As the Lotus chairman and chief executive officer, he was fiercely competitive and occasionally prickly. But he also was an effective leader, who inspired loyalty in the rank and file and led the company to a successful initial public offering, or IPO. By the time he left the company in 1987, he was a wealthy man and rivaled Gates and Steve Jobs in the US high-technology pantheon.

''Back then, Gates and Mitch were the two gods," said longtime Boston marketer Larry Weber, now chairman of W2 Group in Waltham, who worked for Kapor at Lotus. Kapor, however, was less singleminded and more multifaceted than his West Coast peers. ''Mitch never considered himself an operator," Weber said. ''He liked the smallness of the original Lotus, he liked to know everyone by name. I think he missed the Lotus of old, and wanted to explore new things."

Kapor's odyssey in the years since he left Lotus has included a less successful Boston software venture, ON Technology; a teaming with ex-Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow to launch the Electronic Freedom Foundation, conceived as an ACLU for cyberspace; and a difficult stint as a venture capitalist for Accel Partners in Palo Alto, Calif., during which Kapor concluded that he had ''too much emotional attachment" to the entrepreneurs' point of view. Along the way, Kapor got divorced (his children remain on the East Coast) and remarried to workplace consultant Freada Klein, who had been employee relations manager at Lotus. Kapor moved to California part time in 1999, and now lives year round in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood.

As he grew disenchanted with venture capital in 2001 and was casting about for what to do next, Kapor began thinking about open source software. He'd watched the growth of open source products such as the Linux operating system, but had never been part of the movement. ''It was still, in 2001, very much a sideshow," Kapor said. ''But I thought it had the potential to become a much more mainstream sort of thing."

Kapor became a catalyst for bringing open source into the mainstream. He donated $300,000 to the Mozilla Foundation, the group that created Firefox. And he put up $5 million to start OSAF in 2002. ''Mitch was one of the first people who had been enormously successful in the proprietary software world to adopt the open source development model," said Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation and a former Netscape executive. ''That has caused another whole set of people to start looking at open source."

OSAF's team operates out of industrial chic space designed by Kapor's wife in a renovated building in San Francisco's gritty South of Market neighborhood.

One motivation for Kapor is a belief that some of the marketplace needs he had seen in the 1980s, and tried to address at Lotus and ON, remain unmet. He also is convinced that an open source product, which could be licensed freely by all comers, will have more legs than a proprietary product, even if his nonprofit foundation won't make money from it. ''The idea wasn't to produce the same deliverable as a commercial product," Kapor explained. ''It was to do a first thing that, if it met with success, could then grow . . . Other people would come and join the party and take it in unexpected directions."

Kapor inevitably is asked whether he also is driven by the chance to get back at Microsoft, the software company that dislodged Lotus. It is a question with which he is uncomfortable.

''My rage about Microsoft was much more something that drove me in the past," Kapor said. ''It's not a significant factor in what motivates me today. Maybe I grew up, maybe I got it out of my system. I'm much more motivated by the positive goals of creating good software that people can use. I mean, the whole revenge thing is fine for opera. But the idea of displacing Microsoft is not something I aspire to."

At the same time, Kapor contends that the open source movement eventually will end Microsoft's market domination.

''Chandler could fail totally," he said. ''But open source as a movement is something that Microsoft cannot defeat. . . .Their style of triumph and of dominance is part of an era whose time is passing."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.