Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Eazel On The Ropes

Posted by timothy on from the righteous-eye-candy-in-danger dept.

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?

2 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Why not a merger with Ximian? by GauteL · · Score: 5

    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.

  2. I'd say pour the work into Mozilla first by Tyler_L · · Score: 5
    And here's why: I'm a real fan of Eazel. I think that GNOME needs a bit of work in the UI department, and I think that Eazel has done a wonderful job of making the environment more user-friendly and aesthetically appealing. (heaven forbid on a -nix box! *grin*)

    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.