From http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9847739-16.html [1]

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 [2] and the Open Source Applications Foundation [3] for six years on the premise that it would deliver a mind-blowingly innovative PIM (personal information management) suite.

Six years later, Chandler just blows.

OSAF announced [4] 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 [5]. 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.

***

That was from January. Sounds like they're going to try and keep it going, though. Check it out on their blog here: http://blog.chandlerproject.org/