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Eazel On The Ropes
update() writes: "The SFGate has an article on Eazel. It's the usual color-by-numbers piece (embedded MP3 playing; Andy Hertzfeld is a genius) but with one new piece -- without new funding, the company has a month to go before running out of money." Particularly given that Eazel's beautiful desktop is in the new Mandrake 8.0, and scheduled to appear on several other companies' desktops, it would be a shame if the company should dissolve now. I wonder if some of the big names (Red Hat, VA, Mandrake, SuSE) could invest together to keep Eazel going at least for now -- they all stand to benefit. And would a PayPal account for donations be unreasonable?
IBM seems to be marketting itself as the Linux hero. Well, in responce to the Windows desktop war, IBM was more than willing to dump alot of money into the looser desktop formally known as CDE. Now, it is clear after MS and Apple got done reading their customer surveys and doing their marketting research that the Explorer/Finder is the key factor to a successful desktop. It seems clear that Eazel knows how to provide the best possible Explorer/Finder ever created. Now, will IBM be willing to provide the same sort of $backing$ that they provided to CDE? Or is IBM only coming to their own rescue when they run their Linux ads?
It just seems to me that both Gnome and KDE are missing out on an important niche as they go striving for usability for the mass market. At this point in time the *nix desktops simply don't offer much to either the system admin, or to the web developer. Considering that these are the folks most likely using *nix now.
Eazel has tossed the bulk of their effort into making a file manager and putting gobs of ease of use features in and around it. The problem is, that's not where the holes are! Both Gnome and KDE are quite user friendly on their own merits today. Both are making great strides in this realm without venture capital.
To my earlier point of what is missing, for admins I'm referring to good, solid GUI based apps for configuring the basic services. A small suite to deal with Apache, Sendmail, Inn, and other daemons. Today folks would rather tweak on the text files directly then use those few apps that are out there because they aren't nearly as good as they should be yet. Neither GUI environment today provides much for admins.
As to my point about the web developer, there's simply nothing I've seen in the *nix world that compares to Dreamweaver and HomeSite for development. I just have to imagine there are a lot of web developers that would like to work on the platform that Apache runs best on. Neither of those apps are perfect, but telling someone who has been working on a Mac or Windows that they need to take a month out to learn EMACS is just silly. In all fairness, there are some projects looking to provide some of HomeSite's uses, but there's nothing even coming close to Dreamweaver in the way of a GUI HTML editor.
Bottom line, if Eazel does crash and burn I really don't feel that this is an indication of some kind of open source failure. On the contrary, it might go to prove that the environments already in place are plenty user friendly. What is needed are the apps for those folks most likely to be looking to work with Linux or a BSD and expand upon that.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
The problem with both these companies is that
they don't even try to make money, they give
away all their best product for free.
If they wanted to pull in some cash they should
move to a model where they give away source code
for free, and make people pay for their easy
1-2-3 binary installer. After all why would
anyone bother with buying their CDs if it's
easier to download ximian for free off their web
site.
They both pay lip service to the idea of selling
services, but ximian even gives that away in
redcarpet!
Not that I'm complaining, but I do want both of
these companies to stick around, and they have
to make money to do that.
This sucks that Eazel might go under. But I would like to point out a big benefit of Free Software. For example if a company like MS or Apple were to go under. The current owners of their software would be screwed as all updates etc would stop. Free software is different in the fact that if Eazel dies, a group of people will take over. The advantage is that Free Software will never die as long as there is someone to keep it alive. That is also a disadvantage as you cannot really make money from it.
I think a solution to Eazel would be to consolidate with Red Hat or Mandrake, that way they would have a financial backing to continue.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Ximian, as I understand it, still has money. In addition, Ximian is highly dependant of Eazel's work, and has competing business strategies (services). How about Ximian buying out Eazel, thus keeping them alive, and merging Eazels services-strategies with their own. I suspect this would have been the better option from the beginning, as newbies won't like the idea of several different entities from which they are supposed to get help.
Every time Eazel releases a new version of Nautilus, I gleefully download and install the latest and greatest patch or release hoping to have come across something that I can actually use. Every time, I'm disappointed. Here's why.
It's not Eazel's fault. I believe that their part of the application is pretty solid. From what I've seen, it's that dang Mozilla browser that's embedded that renders the application unusable. Without fail (and I've run it on a myriad of boxen with fairly heterogeneous configurations), within a few hours something will snap and Nautilus will choke, requiring me to switch to a text console and remove it with kill. Considering the fact that I've had similar luck with many of the Mozilla releases, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to Eazel and placing the blame on Mozilla instead, though I admit to having never set out to research the phenomenon.
Conclusion: Eazel has a good thing going for them. They're making my favorite desktop more enjoyable. Mozilla also has a good thing going for them. Finally a browser that adhires to the standards set by the W3C. But in my opinion, Mozilla needs far more work than Eazel does, and Eazel can't survive without a bulletproof Mozilla (it's embedded... there's no way around it). Therefore, I say that before we can hope for Eazel to fulfill all our hopes and dreams, we're going to have to finally build a browser that rivals IE in stability.