In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.

Mitch Kapor

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

Mitch Kapor

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

Mitch Kapor

Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.

Mitch Kapor

Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.

Mitch Kapor

It became clear to me by 1984 that Microsoft was likely going to be the big winner in the PC software apps and operating system category, partly because of the dynamics of owning and controlling the operating system: that gave you enormous power, and I came to see Bill Gates was fierce competitor.

Mitch Kapor

Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.

Mitch Kapor

Architecture is politics.

Mitch Kapor

Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put.

Mitch Kapor

If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.

Mitch Kapor

Lotus's efforts around the Mac were pathetically unsuccessful, which is sad.

Mitch Kapor

I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.

Mitch Kapor

I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.

Mitch Kapor

The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.

Mitch Kapor

Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.

Mitch Kapor

Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will 'change the way we think' about ordering takeout, 'fundamentally transform' our shoe purchases, or 'revolutionize' the way we edit photos.

Mitch Kapor

If only I'd stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.

Mitch Kapor

If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.

Mitch Kapor

That's why it has to be a nonprofit, because a nonprofit is required to take monies it receives and use them for the purposes for which it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed.

Mitch Kapor

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

Mitch Kapor

There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.

Mitch Kapor