Mitch Kapor

Kapor founded Lotus Development in 1982, and Lotus 1-2-3 shipped the following year. The spreadsheet became the application that sold the IBM PC to offices and made Kapor rich. He left the company in 1986.

In 1990 the FBI visited John Perry Barlow over a leak of Apple source code, while Operation Sundevil and the raid on Steve Jackson Games were under way. Kapor flew out to see Barlow, and with John Gilmore they founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation to pay for the defence of people whom prosecutors and judges didn't understand. In 2003 he became chair of the newly formed Mozilla Foundation. He remains one of the rare software millionaires whose money has mostly gone towards protecting users from the state.