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Mitch Kapor Joins Ximian Board of Directors
miguel writes: "Today we announced that Mitch Kapor has joined our Board of Directors. He is one of the co-founders of the EFF and Lotus (You can learn more about Mitch here.) In other news, I want to point out guys to our Latest Evolution beta which comes with SSL support (IMAP and SMTP), Pilot syncing and LDAP in the default build. The team at Ximian has been busy fixing every bug you guys have reported (feature requests will have to wait until 1.0 ships, we are in feature freeze now) and we are closing bugs faster that you can report them. What are you guys going to do about this huh? HUH?"
Go use KDE and play with the adults. Or at least the people who don't make it difficult to install on non-RH based 56k dial-up modems.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Sure, you should. Don't you know anything about the history of the Personal Computer? Don't you remember VisiCalc?
The 1978 release of VisiCalc, an electronic spreadsheet and the first personal productivity application, changed software development from a hobbyist's pursuit to a burgeoning industry. Personal Software, the publisher of VisiCalc, bought Tiny Troll from Mr. Kapor as a companion product to VisiCalc and hired him to be a product manager in Silicon Valley. Wanting more autonomy, he left Personal after only six months to found his own company.
Although users loved the concept of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, they were bumping their heads against its limitations. Realizing this, Mr. Kapor cofounded Lotus Development in 1982 with Jonathan Sachs, a programmer from Data General, and came up with Lotus 1-2-3, a second-generation spreadsheet that better addressed the needs of business users.
To get the new company off the ground, Mr. Kapor convinced the former Morgan Stanley analyst andthen-novice venture capitalist Ben Rosen (who had cofounded Sevin Rosen Funds theprevious year) to put $1 million into the startup. Mr. Kapor admits that he in fact knew very little then about running a business; nevertheless, as an executive at Lotus until 1987, he developed what are now considered standard business practices for software companies. Lotus executed the first big advertising campaign for 1-2-3 in the business press and was the first to train computer dealers on a large scale. In 1983, the year it was released, 1-2-3 generated staggering revenues of $53 million and propelled Lotus through its initial public offering. In 1984 the company tripled its revenues, to $156 million. But when Lotus became a big business, Mr. Kapor jumped ship. "Because of Lotus's hypergrowth, the company was soon dominated by the details of day-to-day management," he says. "But I wanted to think long term and bring big ideas to market."
After Lotus, Mr. Kapor rediscovered his interest in the future of technology. He became enamored of the precommercial Internet and the social possibilities of virtual communities. But he was equally horrified by some of the government's early attempts to sanitize Internet content. In 1990, to protect the organic and unregulated potential of the Net, Mr. Kapor and the social activist John Perry Barlow cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), thefirst grassroots coalition to call attention to both the social andpolitical dimensions of networked communications. (For more on Mr. Barlow,see "What Does John Perry Barlow Do?,"March 1998.)
In 1994, once the EFF was going strong, Mr. Kapor decided to turn his full attention to financing and advising technology startups. Although as an entrepreneur he had been suspicious of venture capitalists, he became a limited partner in VC funds and also made direct investments in startups, working closely with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and AccelPartners. Mr. Kapor believes he is finally using his strengths --identifying ideas with staying power and getting them off the ground -- andnot getting bogged down in the politics of large organizations. Hecurrently sits on the boards of RealNetworks, which develops real-timestreaming audio and video software; Allaire, which makes Web applicationdevelopment software; and several younger startups he declines to name.
Looking back at his 20-year involvement in the technology industry, Mr. Kapor says that "the days of the Apple II and Tiny Troll feel like Jurassic Park, especially if you count in Internet years." Speaking like a former teacher of meditation, he adds, "I try to send the message that business does not have to be ruthless and self-interested -- that even in the frenzied pace of the technology market, a fundamentally long-term approach still matters."
THanks to you both. I simply didn't realize the Install button listed more packages. Scary I know ho to configure Apache, Postfix, Samba and the like but I'm not that great with a pretty GTK GUI installer.