OSAF Corporate FAQ

Background information and answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about OSAF.

4/14/2003

Questions

1. What is OSAF?
2. Where is OSAF located?
3. Who founded OSAF? How was the idea for OSAF conceived?
4. Who are the members of OSAF's management team and board of directors?
5. Who are OSAF's funders?
6. When was OSAF incorporated as a non-profit organization?
7. How many employees does OSAF have?
8. How many volunteers are currently working with OSAF?
9. How large do you anticipate OSAF becoming in the future?
10. Is OSAF hiring? If so, what types of people are you looking to bring on?
11. What type of company culture has OSAF created?
12. What role does Mitch Kapor play at OSAF?
13. What role is Andy Hertzfeld filling at OSAF?
14. Does OSAF have a technical board of advisors?
15. What are OSAFs short term and long term goals?
16. Who will be OSAFs key customers?
17. Does OSAF have a revenue model? What type of licensing model do you have in place?
18. Since OSAF is a non-profit and will not seek an IPO, how much funding do you need in the future to keep the organization alive?

What is OSAF?

OSAF is the Open Source Applications Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit foundation. OSAF's mission is to create and gain wide adoption of Open Source application software of uncompromising quality. <top>

Where is OSAF located?

OSAF's main office is located at 177 Post St., Suite 900, San Francisco CA 94108. Most of the core development team is currently working out of sub-leased office space in Belmont, about 20 minutes south of SF. OSAF is planning to move everyone together to a new location in San Francisco sometime late this summer. <top>

Who founded OSAF? How was the idea for OSAF conceived?

Mitchell Kapor founded OSAF. He wrote about the "Origins of the Open Source Applications Foundation" in his weblog on Oct. 17, 2002:

OSAF started in 2001 when Mitchell Kapor began to investigate the possibility of developing a modern Personal Information Manager using open source tools and methods.

In the spring of 2001, Mitch initiated a limited experiment by hiring a consulting group to prototype a couple of the key ideas. The results were both exciting and encouraging, and so, in the summer of 2001, he took the plunge, committed to open source, and hired the first employee of a fledgling non-profit, the Open Source Applications Foundation, with the mission to create and gain wide adoption of open source application software of uncompromising quality. In February 2002, OSAF obtained Federal 501c3 nonprofit status. <top>

Who are the members of OSAF's board of directors?

Mitchell Kapor manages the day to day operations of OSAF. The OSAF board of directors is comprised of:

• Mitchell Kapor - Founder and Chair OSAF, founder Lotus Development Corp., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• Tim O'Reilly - Founder and President, O'Reilly and Associates
• Pamela Samuelson - Professor, School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley
• John Lilly - VP Products and Board Member, Reactivity, Inc. <top>

Who are OSAF's funders?

Mr. Kapor provided the initial commitment of $5 million for the foundation.

In September 2003, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the 25 university members of the Common Solutions Group (CSG) have agreed to provide OSAF a total of $2.75 million in grants. These additional funds will allow OSAF to extend the functionality of the Chandler software application to meet the information technology needs of higher education. <top>

When was OSAF incorporated as a non-profit organization?

OSAF was incorporated as a non-profit public corporation in the State of CA on May 30, 2001. In February 2002, OSAF obtained Federal 501(c)3 nonprofit status. <top>

How many employees does OSAF have?

As of February, 2004, there are ninteen people working full-time or mostly full-time on Chandler. Our intent is to keep the core team small, but to leverage their work by using the resources of the worldwide open source community to augment the core team efforts. <top>

How many volunteers are currently working with OSAF?

OSAF has received the benefit of hundreds of members of the open source community who have contributed to the Chandler project through our design and development mailing lists and the Chandler Wiki, a collaborative communications tool. Currently, at the end of February 2004 there are just a handful of volunteer developers working with the core development team, but as the code base becomes more stable later this Spring, we expect that number to increase significantly. <top>

How large do you anticipate OSAF becoming in the future?

We expect to expand the core team significantly in 2004 (see the Employment page for details of open positions), and we also expect to begin aggregating active open source developers, testers, documenters, etc. beginning about mid-year 2004. <top>

Is OSAF hiring? If so, what types of people are you looking to bring on?

Check to see if we still have open positions posted on our Employment Web page. <top>

What type of company culture has OSAF created?

Although we don't have a formal statement regarding organizational values we could say that OSAF values collaboration between highly motivated individuals who bring a passion for excellence, commitment to high standards of performance and quality of product, a capacity for creativity, and respect for others and their differences to their work.

We hold ourselves and others to standards of honesty, fairness, and accountability in our dealings.<top>

What role does Mitch Kapor play at OSAF?

Mitch is working on Chandler as a full-job. He provides the team with vision and guidance. And in his duly elected role as benign-dictator he fills the difficult role of decision maker in a highly collaborative effort. <top>

What role is Andy Hertzfeld filling at OSAF?

Andy, one of OSAF's volunteers and earliest contributors, brings his passion for excellence in user experience as well as his expertise in open source methods to OSAF. Andy also wrote an early prototype of Chandler (called Vista) that promoted crucial thinking about the features, functionality, agent frameworks and scripting, and user interface of this new product. <top>

Does OSAF have a technical board of advisors?

While OSAF does not have a formal technical board of advisors, OSAF gets useful technical advice from hundreds of participants on the OSAF design and development mailing lists. There is however a "Westwood" Advisory Council with representatives from the higher education sector. <top>

What is OSAFs focusing on right now?

OSAF will post the first public release (rel 0.1) of the Chandler code in April 2003. In the "dot releases" (0.1-0.5 release), we will focus on platform and infrastructure, designing and testing out our compelling killer capabilities, putting in place a modular architecture and providing basic elements of end-user applications to validate our platform. These releases will primarily target open source developers since there will be little functionality of interest to end users.

In these releases, we will focus on designing and building the base platform and infrastructure (e.g. data repository, storage, viewer parcel, application framework, etc.) since open source developers need a minimum set of supporting platform functionality in order to develop their own functionality. Our killer feature capabilities which are discontinuous innovations of Chandler, will require multiple iterations of testing and usage to determine the right design (e.g. data model, Agenda-like Outline Table Widget, Sharing/Collaboration features). From the beginning, Chandler will have a modular or extensible architecture which will allow open source developers to contribute modules and code in a more loosely coupled fashion. And these early releases will incrementally provide the basic elements of end-user applications (email, contacts and calendar) to drive and validate the design and testing of the core code. <top>

Who will be OSAFs key customers?

The target user for Chandler is someone who has a great deal of information in the form of email, contacts, calendar events, and other notes and who needs a tool to help sort through and expeditiously retrieve the relevant bits. Chandler will take advantage of the interdependence of intermodal information to help for example, find a spreadsheet email attachment that came from someone, whom you can't remember, who invited you to a meeting you attended last June.

Our organizational focus will be peer-to-peer (largely decentralized) groups of such info-centric users. As the term ‘info-centric’ can be rather generic, we refer to an info-centric user as one with the following important characteristics:

• Has a high need to create, process and organize information spanning multiple topics or domains and inter-related in many interesting ways.
• Handles a high volume of information transactions on a daily basis (e.g. >25 emails/day and complex scheduling needs)
• Is a self-declared technology enthusiast. This user is excited and technically able to try out new technologies. A simple statement of the benefits of Chandler is sufficient to motivate this user. It won’t be necessary to rely on expensive ‘push’-style marketing (such as brand, emotional or lifestyle marketing) to convince the user to try out Chandler.
• Requires little reliance on organizational infrastructure to enjoy Chandler. For example, the user is either not tethered to a proprietary email or calendar server such as Exchange or Notes or is willing to use Chandler for tasks that are decoupled from such centralized infrastructure.
• Has a need to share and collaborate with like-minded info-centric individuals in ad-hoc and informal groups.
  <top>

Does OSAF have a revenue model? What type of licensing model do you have in place?

OSAF is a 501(c)3 non-profit foundation. It received an initial $5 million commitment from Mr. Kapor. Support for open source development from institutions -- like the $98,000 grant we received in March 2003 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation -- are significant in ensuring sustainability of a non-profit open source endeavor like OSAF. Since the Chandler application will be distributed for free, OSAF actively seeks grants and donations to provide sustained future development and support.

OSAF also intends to have a hybrid license policy. If distribution of Chandler, with or without any modifications, includes the source code and an "open source" license there is no fee. If, however, someone wants to distribute the application with modifications but without the source code, then we plan to have a license fee. That fee will help support the ongoing efforts of OSAF. <top>

Since OSAF is a non-profit and will not seek an IPO, how much funding do you need in the future to keep the organization alive?

The initial commitment of $5 million from Mr. Kapor was intended to provide sufficient funding to take the development of Chandler through the end of 2005. We are still focused on our original target of supporting info-centric users, in small groups in a decentralized fashion.

In September 2003, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the 25 university members of the Common Solutions Group (CSG) have agreed to provide OSAF a total of $2.75 million in grants. These additional funds will allow OSAF to extend the functionality of the Chandler software application to meet the information technology needs of higher education.

What types of donations is OSAF looking to attract and from what types of companies or organizations?

Since the Chandler application will be distributed for free, OSAF actively seeks grants and donations to provide sustained future development and support. We believe there will be multiple sources of income -- from corporate sponsorship to licensing fees to foundation support. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was the first institution to provide additional funds to support our work followed by the 25 universities in the Common Solutions Group; see the Grant Announcement on the OSAF web site. <top>