Eazel Come, Eazel Go?

An AC writes: "Dotcomscoop.com claims that Eazel (of Nautilus fame) closed down today. A News.com column lends some credibility to this report." It isn't clear whether Eazel went down today, or will close next week, but the end seems certain.

Comments

Funny observation about Slashdot people

[Anonymous Coward]

When a company announces it's "doing something for Linux," ....everyone is excited. But when that company fails...damn...the dogs come out... Indrema. When this thing started, I could only read good things about an open source game console. When it failed, the hindsight kicked in. All I read about was the "I knew it would fail" messages. Eazel. Everyone on Slashdot (save the KDE goons) loved it. Now that there is word of closure, the hounds circle again. My bet we'll be seeing Loki bashing again shortly... No need for flames, just an observation... Oh yeah, to appease the Slashdot people - M$ sucks!

Yeah, applications, ok... shut up.

[dangermouse]

I'm fairly sick of seeing posts from "average users" who have decided to descend from on high and enlighten the "geeks" as to what it is they need. So I'm going to postpone sleep for a few minutes and address those posts, which go something like this:

I'm a Typical User, and what you geeks just don't get is that we Typical Users don't care about our OS or our window manager. All we're interested in is whether the applications we need exist and help us do our jobs more efficiently.

Yeah, we know.

We get it. You only care about the apps. Freaking great. You know what? You still need an OS, and you still need a GUI. In fact, you need an OS and a decent GUI/toolkit before you can seriously even consider writing applications.

Well, we've got the OS part more or less licked, but it's an interesting realm for us "geeks", so we're going to continue to work on it, continue to talk about it in our little net-centric communities, and maybe even continue to recommend that you Typical Users use a decent OS. The GUI is also interesting, it's shiny, and it's where a lot of development is happening now... so we're going to work on it and talk about it and maybe even recommend a good one of those to you as well. Get over it.

We know you need applications. We need them, too, because we aren't all full-time "geeks". So don't feel the need to interject into every OS or GUI discussion with some crap about applications, and don't pretend as if we're just too stupid to realize you need them. It's irritating and repetitious beyond belief.

Re:BeOS in the toilet too -- and it ain't free

[Squid]

Be failed because Jean-Louis Gassee didn't WANT to succeed. Read through the Be Newsletters - you can actually WATCH him backpedaling from every success! Every time BeOS came close to being a big hit on any platform, he throttled back - when the BeBox was selling decently well he canned it, when BeOS on Power Mac was popular he committed to an x86-only strategy (and denied he was on such a strategy for two years while making up brain-dead excuses for not porting to the G3), when BeOS PE was a runaway success he decided to refocus the company on "internet appliances". On one hand he'd offer BeOS x86 FREE to any PC vendor willing to preinstall it, and at the same time turned down PPC system vendor Pios (now Metabox) when they wanted to license it (for money) and even offered do the port details themselves! Hell, just COMPARING what JLG said in a newsletter to what the company actually did six months later should be an eye opener - assuming the newsletters are even still available online (somewhere at be.com I'd guess - frankly, I'm too livid at JLG's handling of it all to even visit the site to check!).

As to BeOS running what people wanted or needed to run, the apps would have come, had Jean-Louis not blown it. I still don't know what he did to piss off Adobe, but one week they were porting Photoshop to it, and the next they weren't.

BeOS wouldn't have needed to run EVERYTHING - just enough to establish a base. As a dual-boot toy it was beginning to catch on. As a dual-boot work environment with a reasonable spread of applications and SOME amount of file-format compatibility, I think it would have started raking in market share. Indeed, if it had been allowed to actually become what JLG originally said he wanted - a content-creation system, with at least one each of paint programs, 3D modelers, video editors, and music programs - it wouldn't have NEEDED to run Microsoft Word, it would have found its own niche replacing Amigas in multimedia shops and TV studios. (Especially back two years ago when there WERE still Amigas in TV studios.) Instead it never became much more than a proof of concept, and once the company goes away, the source code will probably go down with it.

Re:Standard X desktop?

[Rob Kaper]

But it was just wrong for KDE to pick the poisoned apple no matter how tempting, and the fact they still don't seem to understand why is a problem.

That, or you could admit that the trust the KDE team placed in Trolltech was just.

• On June 22, 1998 they KDE and Trolltech created a foundation to ensure Trolltech couldn't lock Qt away
• meanwhile other KDE developers worked on a free Qt version
• Quite a few KDE developers work for Trolltech (some at key positions) so the relationship is quite good and there is a good understanding within the Trolls of the needs of KDE
• Trolltech developed the QPL almost specifically because of KDE issues
• Trolltech released Qt under the GPL, again to benefit KDE

Over the course of 5 years (1997-2001), Trolltech has never had the intention to screw up KDE or free software. Trolltech always accepted patches and even gave official permission for some alternate distributions.

The KDE team trusted the Trolls. I can understand why you were wary of KDE for doing so, but in the end it looks to me like that trust was just well-placed.

Does it matter?

[enterfornone]

I don't think you can really say that Eazel died because Nautilus sucked. The software is independant of their business model.

Sure Eazel were the people who created Nautilus, but it doesn't just disapear now that they are gone. All that goes is a bunch services that no one used anyway.

--

KDE vs GNOME vs KDE

[FFFish]

Daft buggers, all of you.

It doesn't matter what you hacker geeks think is the better windows manager, whether you prefer C or C++, whether Qt is evile or saviour, etc.

What matters is what the majority of end users prefer.

And at some point, the majority are going to be people like me: people who use the computer as a tool, and choose our software not for geek-karma, but for how productive it can make us.

I don't give two short strokes whatthefuck OS or general GUI I'm using. I spend so little time with either, that they're both irrelevent.

What's important to me are my bread-and-butter applications and how they make me work faster or better. Yes, their GUI component is a factor, but these days, all GUIs are pretty darn similar once they hit application level.

So is it gonna be KDE or GNOME or what that wins? Answer: it's gonna be whichever one gets the killer "office" applications first.

And given that there's a dearth of killer Linux "office" apps right now -- yah, sure, StarOffice and Applix and Corel and shite, but none of the are primo and complete -- it's probably all moot.


--

Re:KDE vs GNOME vs KDE

[PhiRatE]

I find this comment highly amusing. Your office suite makes you so productive? your GUI file managers and your bloated "word processors" and your pretty point-and-drool email clients make you productive?

I utterly disagree.

The only advantage to these shiny toys is the extremely low level of time needed to learn how to use them. Thats it, right there.

For email productivity, watch a "hacker geek" use mutt, for editing, vi or emacs or joe, for file management, a command-line, the find command, for statistics and analysis, perl, gnuplot, whatever.

The simple fact is that the "majority" you stand there and speak of is the lazy majority, those who don't use the computer as a tool, they use the computer as a shiny toy. Check this out! I can pick up my shiny toy and play with it for 10 minutes and end up with a sandcastle! joy!

Wanna build a house? take yonder "tools", the hammer, the nail, the pieces of wood. Simple aren't they? Can you build a house? don't be stupid, you could try, it'd take you ages and it'll most like fall down unless you're a builder.

Being productive, fast, effective, this requires learning, it requires an investment of time in understanding the physics of wood placement, in gaining the experience to know how much wood you need, what to hit, where, when, why.

Sure everyone and their kid sister can write a document using Word. Yay. But don't for an instant believe that these shiny toys designed specifically to allow you and your kid sister to write a document without having to invest much time is in any way "efficient".

All that code, all that bulk, all those buttons and threads, and GUIs and windows and context sensitive helpbars, are there because you need it.

You are directly responsible for the inefficiency of the software you use.

Think what this really means. It means that instead of suffering a high initial startup cost, in learning an effective and efficient method of communication with your computer, you are forever stuck with a higher-cost interface.

You cannot control your computer effectively, you cannot make it work for you as it should. If you were only going to touch your computer 10 times in your life, this would be no big deal, but the fact is that everyone is moving to computers, everything is moving to computers. You wanna do anything in an office today? you're most likely going to use a computer.

Every moment that you stand there waiting for a GUI to load, every second that you spend recovering from Windows crashing, every idle tap of the mouse that goes by as you wait for Word to load so you can send out a memo, is your wasted life.

You're dying of fear. You fear you'll break it, you fear the unknown, you fear that somehow you don't have the time to learn all that you need to learn.

You don't have a second to lose. Learn, now, quick, before you lose another second of your life to your "productivity" software.

Re:Standard X desktop?

[landley]

The problem is a lot of people don't trust the KDE team's judgement.

This is residue from when QT was a "source under glass" library. Yes, that has now been fixed, but back when that was the case, THE KDE PEOPLE DID NOT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT.

Anybody remember Unix? Everyone blissfully ignoring AT&T's unenforced copyright for fifteen years, then out of the blue "oh, by the way, all your bases are belonging to us". That kind of thing leaves a scar on a community.

More recently, the reason 90% of the Java development momentum drained away into Linux in 1998 was that everyone realised that Sun was never going to release Java to the ISO. We all remember how Microsoft was all sweetness and light compared to IBM, at first. And how IBM's commodity PC was saving the world from (pick one: Apple, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM's own mainframes, Somebody Else. Until the PS/2, anyway). But Sun wouldn't even port the JDK to Linux (which annoyed people who had never even HEARD of Linux). If they support that, what else wouldn't they allow?

Nobody ever REALLY trusts a "benevolent dictator", they're only happy if they know they have a way out. They may never really believe they'll need to use it, but people get claustrophobic otherwise. Even the best of the lot, Linus or Guido Van Rossom or Larry Wall, COULD BE REPLACED. If necessary. Everyone's sanity depends on it. If any of them came down with a brain infection and started going after people with an axe, a new leader would be ready and the community would go on. It ISN'T currently necessary, and we're happy that's so. But we couldn't sleep at night otherwise.

The KDE people -ARE- happy inserting proprietary technology into the fundamental infrastructure upon which we're all trying to build shared code. And that ALWAYS winds up causing a problem, it's just a question of how long it takes to snowball. But they don't SEE it.

The fact that this instance of the problem has been fixed doesn't mean the Gnome folks have started to trust the KDE people's judgement, because they WON'T ADMIT THEY MADE A MISTAKE!

Nothing against TrollTech. Nice people who simply didn't understand the benefits of dual licensing, and their code IS now GPL. But it was just wrong for KDE to pick the poisoned apple no matter how tempting, and the fact they still don't seem to understand why is a problem.

Rob

What Eazel really did....

[deeny]

What Eazel really did was dry up venture capital for Linux software businesses in the future that might *have* a viable revenue model. So, while there's a rough version of Nautilus out there (on the basis of a proposed revenue stream on *another* product that wasn't designed or implemented), that development was funded by people who wanted their money back.

So, for those people who think it's "cool" that Eazel "gave" Nautilus to the Linux community, realize that they did so solely and only to buy your trust -- and they bought it with other people's money.

Money that, had it not been blown on the biggest self-indulgent hackfest in the open source community's history, might fund your job next year or two years hence. But now it won't.

_Deirdre

Re:It was a matter of interpretation.,,

[DV]

It's time to move on. KDE is cranking, GNOME is press releasing.

Hum, I appreciate this SOOOOO MUCH

After all I coded 95% of the XML and XSLT Gnome libraries. And who's using them now ? I'm all about reuse, I like it, but I hate your attitude.

Let's face it, I appreciate working with the KDE guys involved in the reuse. But I'm fucking tired of hearing this kind of stupid rants.

Yes I'm part of the Gnome fundation, mind you I was elected, and we all collectively believe in this project. Go code on your side, but don't come to piss people off on public fora.

Daniel Veillard

Re:Is Gnome next?

[Simon Brooke]

This sort of thing is exactly why I've decided I don't want to be part of the KDE Community (should that be Kommunity?). The pro-KDE stuff I can live with, but the GNOME bashing seems to be getting worse all the time and it puts me off. Maybe it's because KDE seems to be gaining support and the more people that use it the more vocal advocates there are.

Look, get real here. I'm not a member of either camp - I program in Java. I happen to use KDE as a desktop because it's stable and functional and looks good and works for me. But I've been using Linux since before either of these projects started and I do remember my history. Gnome was founded purely and simply as an ideological KDE bashing exercise, and it's gone on being more offensively political ever since (such as when Ximian bought 'KDE' as a keyword on Google, so that anyone who did a search for KDE would get an advert for Gnome).

Yes, some KDE 'supporters' have bashed back against the persistent KDE bashing from senior members of the Gnome camp, and it would have been better if they hadn't.

But to claim that KDE are the ones guilty of bashing in this saga is a weird distortion of history.

Let's face it, there's always been room for several window managers. There's plenty of room for more than one desktop environment. Linux is not forced into a homogenous straight-jacket, and thank $DEITY for that.

If you like Gnome, use Gnome. If (like me) you prefer KDE, use KDE. But for heaven's sake stop bashing!

Re:Standard X desktop?

[Simon Brooke]

However GPL/RMS hardliners such as yourself have a hard time digesting the concept. You ought to look a little deeper into the dogma of your source code religion, you'll sacrifice functionality over licensing issues

To be honest, I don't believe (and have never believed) that the KDE/Gnome row had much to do with licences. I think it is fundamentally about geography. The KDE team started in Germany and is still largely European; the Gnome team is largely based in the American continent. I think what we're seeing is American users of a Finnish operating system geting flustered because these upstart Europeans think they can build a desktop. People are very odd...

Nautilus was crap anyway

[ikekrull]

Maybe it's just me, but i thought Nautilus was an extremely poor example of a desktop app. It was slow on my P3-500/256MB of RAM, and excruciatingly slow on my Dual P-Pro 200/96MB RAM machine. It was unusable as a web browser because it took so long a) to render the page and the b) to render the buttons which gave you the option to view the page in other browsers. It took too long to bring up a folder listing, even in list view, and even with few files in the folder. It makes a worse file manager than gmc - at least gmc seems fairly fast, and doesn't hog resource, nor go into 'D' uninterruptible sleep on the 2.4.3 kernel. It was plain ugly - this 'the web browser is the OS' paradigm is wasteful of screen real-estate and looks stupid. the giant 'Eazel' throbber was unnecessary, and pointless. Its root window integration is abysmally poor - shutting out all other apps which also use the root window. It had yet another theme layer, meaning it can't use GTK, KDE or Mozilla themes, instead providing its own themes. Font antialiasing was bad. Text was just blurry, not 'antialiased' - whatd they do, run a gaussian blur filter over each of the glyphs in the font? Frankly, there was nothing good about Eazel accept the ability to thumbnail images, which isn't a capability i'd choose to label a 'revolution in desktop functionality' Does it really surprise anyone that a company shipping a half-assed product like Nautilus goes straight down the drain? If i tried to sell a similar product for Windows or the MacOS, i doubt i'd make a dollar either.

Re:uh

[vrt3]

Somewhat offtopic, but, does anybody realize that in order to have free software, we must have proprietary software? Somebody somewhere has to pay these programmers, or they'll starve to death.

I suggest you read Eric S. Raymond's "The magic cauldron" for a thoughtfull essay on that subject: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/

Good riddance to yet another bad business model!

[burtonator]

I can't say I will ever miss Eazel. They had a terrible business model, and a terrible product,

VC: Let me get this straight. You want to build a company that makes a "really awesome" desktop.

Eazel: Yes. It will be awesome!

VC: How will you make money?

Eazel: We will integrate out technology and sell our backend services.

VC: So what makes you different than all the other companies that sell backend services?

Eazel: We will use the very hyped Open Source model and run on top of Linux. BTW. The founders are "geniuses" that wrote the original Apple UI.

VC: Wow... here is 11 million!

.... 1 year later and 11 million down the drain they only come up with bloated, and buggy file manager. What a waste of money. I could have done this myself for only $5 million :)

If I remember correctly KDE was developed with $0 and Konqueror is much nicer and faster than Nautilus.

Eazel was founded on Hype. OSS hype, Linux hype, services hype, and the hype that it's founders were geniuses. (obviously they are not)

The Internet hype that has been going on needs to die if we are going to move forward. As Internet professionals we need to prove that what we are creating is real! We need to prove that we aren't getting VC money based on hype but on a real idea which is economically responsible.

I think this is another nail in GNOME's coffin. When Qt was proprietary I was gung ho for GNOME to succeed. Now that Qt is Free Software and GNOME is technically inferior to KDE, the GNOME developers should start to move over to KDE.

Obviously this should be a responsible step by step sequence which keeps the GNOME code base but starts to migrate it into KDE. If not GNOME will just die because KDE has a superior code base and is moving much faster IMO.

I can't imagine that Nautilus will have the same level of support that it had when Eazel was a company with funding. I would imagine that only a percentage of the developers will continue working on Nautilus. This gives the GNOME
project the burden of supporting a thick code base (Nautilus).

KDE/Konqueror does not have this problem. I really see that this will allow them to leap-frog over GNOME by one generation.

Kevin

trolling...

[Ender Ryan]

Wow, this is really a shame. I have to say I'm not surprised at all though, their business modem really didn't seem to make sense. I didn't get what their services were supposed to be all about, how can you add services into a file manager that are strong enough to base a business on?

Anyway, I'm noticing a lot of KDE trolling going on here... It may just be me, I'm not sure, but it really seems to me that a lot of KDE users like to cut on Gnome really badly. I don't see the same thing coming from Gnome users, I wonder why this is, I'm not inferring anything, I'm honestly curious.

In any case, since there seem to be so many people trolling for KDE, I figure I'll just become the first Gnome troll, so, here it goes...

I like Gnome because...

1. It's pretty
2. It's pretty
3. It's pretty
4. It works pretty well
5. Corner panels ROCK!

Things I would really like for Gnome

1. An icon box type thing exactly like in Enlightenment.
2. Nautilus, completed... bugs fixed, performance enhanced, theming features complete. Hopefully someone will continue developing it.

Things I absolutely *HATE* about KDE

1. It's ugly
2. It's ugly
3. It's ugly
4. Let me explain ugly, when I say ugly, I mean that it just doesn't feel right... at all. To me, it just looks/feels like it's trying to be an exact ripoff of windows while at the same time adding eye candy. Now, that's not entirely bad, but it just falls way short. The look and feel is just slightly off which is extremely irritating. The eye candy just doesn't work either. Take a look at Konqueror, it has the UGLIEST interface I've seen since I stopped using motif apps. Look at the buttons, they're hideous! And they way they are dithered when they are inactive, it's God awfully hideous looking!
5. I *HATE* panels that stretch across the whole bottom/top/side of the screen. I don't need that many buttons, please, corner panels just save so much screen real estate.

To be fair... things I like about KDE.
1. It works
2. There are some great apps
3. Everything is integrated a little better than in Gnome, especially the WM.

Anyway, back on topic... Nautilus was a great step up for Gnome, I really hope development is continued, it really completes the Gnome desktop.

I hope I don't start a flame fest, that's not my intention...

Re:Standard X desktop?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I don't mean this to sound like a flame, but you must be trippin! Nautilus is Open Source(GPL'd even). Unless Eazel's code REALLY blows, I see the GNOME project taking this over, and hopefully improving it. Then again, this all depends on the source and what it looks like. Heck the Eazel developers may still end up working on it.Unfortunately, noone will know until the Eazel speaks!

An accident?

[rweir]

Here's my semi-conspiracy theory for the day:
Imagine that you want to make Linux more user friendly, easier for people familiar with Windows or MacOS to switch to. You decide that you the solution is to build a new file manager and release it as Free Software, but you need money to bay for programmers, computers, bandwitdt, etc. What could be the solution?

Maybe you could start your own company, and get venture capital to pay for it all. With all the Linux hype at the time, it's probably not too hard to find. You come up with some vague but plausible sounding plans for making money at some point in the future with 'backend services' or 'web integration' or whatever buzzwords you can come up with. Now, you're going to release your file manager under the GPL, so you code away for a year or two, and then reach a v1.0 release. All of a sudden, you announce that you have no money left, and no chance of making any soon. You go bust, the venture capital company loses a bit of cash, and the community gets an outstanding piece of software FOR FREE. That's right, you just got a venture capital company to pay for it, and now the source is out there, Free for the taking, with source code!
Doesn't this sound like the ultimate investment hack?

Re:It was a matter of interpretation.,,

[bero-rh]

So that's how the history books are being rewritten now

Not quite - it's been that way. Ok, not everyone backed Harmony (the free Qt rewrite), but it did get to a point where it was nearly usable.

KDE never switched over to it simply because it wasn't completed (and eventually discontinued when Qt was open sourced).

How about not basing it on a proprietary toolkit in the first place

KDE didn't start as a "Hey, my OS lacks a decent interface for beginners, let's write one!" project, but as a "I've had a look at Qt, it seems to be possible to do this quickly..." project.
There was no specific plan or development group involved.

Besides, waiting for a decent free toolkit would have delayed the process for quite a while. Or can you name a usable toolkit that existed at that time?

IMO, making use of a proprietary library is OK if it's a temporary thing. Especially when that library is semi-open (you could always port it to your favorite OS and stuff).

The KDE project was dead meat with the original Qt license

If that is so, please explain why Caldera and Corel didn't include Gnome even when Qt was not fully open source. There must have been at least a number of people who disagree with you. (I agree with you though, unless we can assume Harmony would have been finished in Qt's license hadn't changed (and I think so)).

So you are ok with all libraries used in Linux being GPL?

If you have the option to buy different licensing at a reasonable price, yes. I don't see a problem with everyone having to contribute - if someone doesn't want to release his code, have them contribute in other ways.

Re:Standard X desktop?

[bero-rh]

You probably didn't follow KDE development at that time closely enough.

Many KDE developers have always had a problem with the Qt 1.x license, to the point of starting the Harmony project, which was basically a free rewrite of Qt. The project was dumped after TrollTech's announcement that Qt would fall under the BSD license if they stopped developing it (meaning no new release in 6 months), and that Qt 2.0 would be truly Open Source.

The KDE people -ARE- happy inserting proprietary technology into the fundamental infrastucture

Not true (at least not anymore). Even for Qt 1.x, a free replacement was underway.

It was a matter of interpretation.,,

[alexhmit01]

It was NEVER illegal to distribute KDE, OR QT. It was questionable whether you could SHIP KDE already compiled with QT. It was a theoretical arguement, and a silly one. More importantly, it was a dispute. The KDE team maintained that the GPL did NOT prohibit what they did. RMS maintained that it did. RMS wrote the thing, but that doesn't mean that he is correct. I think that the KDE camp likely was correct, because in the unlikely scenario that someone would press the charge, I think that KDE (and whoever distributed it) would prevail.

Go to xemacs.com and read about the RMS tirade. RMS's licensing views ARE NOT appeased by making everything GPL'd. He is on a political movement and the politics are what matter to him, not the quality of code.

Linux allows closed source binary modules in the Linux kernel, should everyone here boycott Linux? He is allowing the core of the OS to be dependant on proprietary components, let's throw a temper tantrum.

TrollTech wasn't misguided, they DISAGREED with RMS's theory of a derivate product. The maintained that linking against QT didn't make you a derivative. They have since decided to accept the community's theory (not really tested) and release under the GPL.

TrollTech is making money on their commercial contracts, and they are happy to let KDE build off of it. They even GPL'd QT to help KDE's adoption. Does QT benefit from KDE dominating, yes. But note that QT includes an IDE, and now KDE has one that competes with it (for free). At this point, the ONLY reason to buy QT is a commercial product OR a QT-based product without KDE.

KDE offered us a useful GUI for a while, and busted ass. GNOME started to spite KDE, and RMS used it as a soapbox.

I TOTALLY respect RMS's works and I respect his views, but sometimes we need to ask ourselves the goal.

UNLESS you buy 100% into his philosophy on free software, then you NEED to REALLY evaluate this. If you are not a TOTAL Free Software diehard, then ask yourself if TOTALLY Free (GNU's GPL in fact) desktop with great code is good enough, or you need to be pissed off about a resolved licensing dispute.

It's time to move on. KDE is cranking, GNOME is press releasing.

Alex

Re:Standard X desktop?

[nullity]

Your post is based on the (rather poor) assumption that the demise of Eazel is a step in the ultimate degredation of the GNOME project. Even as an (ex) Eazel employee I think you underestimate the resilience of the GNOME project. For one thing, many of us who worked on Nautilus as Eazel employees will continue to work on Nautilus. The reason Nautilus appears to have relatively few volunteer contributors is it tended to hire people who made significant contributions! I'm sure most of us who started that way will continue to hack on Nautilus.

It saddens me greatly to see so many in the free software community scrambling to exploit the fate of their brothers. Do KDE users truly enjoy seeing their fellow project suffer setbacks, or is it the out-spoken minority? Though I can't speak for other GNOME developers, I personally feel more of an affinity than dislike for the KDE project. We're doing the same thing. We're working for the same goal. Doesn't that make us comrades rather than enemies?!?

"but KDE would be the only desktop environment / component framework"

I might remark snidely that KDE does not yet have a component framework. It has a method for inter-program embedding (KParts), but this is not the same as a component framework. poke, poke. This is a great example of how it is *still* beneficial to both projects to have the other around. True, there is some duplicated effort, but my hope is that Bonobo and OAF will prompt the KDE project to strengthen KParts to the extent that it is a full component framework. Similarly, there are ways where we (the GNOME project) are lifting useful features from KDE. Lots of people seem to pay lip-service to competition but get squeemish when they see it at work.

"This really sucks for the GNOME users and developers. But what can you do?"

The same thing we have always done: Write code. Fix bugs. Write documentation. Translate. Polish. Add features. Keep improving. What do you do?

-Seth (seth@eazel.com)

Re:Shame....

[cliffiecee]

Yea, my boss helped me reduced my commute time to zero.

VCs == prude?

[coolgeek]

From the news.com article: ...said rumor control professional Diane Carlini...But investments at this point in time are a little trickier because the VCs are not putting out as much as they were six months ago.

VCs not putting out? Seems to me like they're having a field day fucking people lately...

Re:Standard X desktop?

[e_n_d_o]

Eazel is in no way an important piece of Gnome.

Nautilus *IS* an important piece of Gnome, and the only concern is whether development of Nautilus can continue without its developers being funded by this now defunct company. We'll have to wait and see who will stop development on Nautilus, and who will take over for them. The product might die, or it might reach goals that it never could have under the direct control of a for-profit company.

The loss of Eazel's services infrastructure won't be a blow to the Gnome community. Ximian offers many of the same services, as does Red Hat, and other distributions.

Regardless of what happens, thank you, Eazel, for GIVING us Nautilus. While born prematurely and still needing much work, this file manager has the most potential of any I've seen. If development continues and Nautilus is pushed to be the best at what it was always meant to be (just a really nice file manager), I think it may someday be hands down the best product of its kind.
--

Well, I guess it didn't work out as I had hoped.

[proxima]

I was really hoping that Eazel would be bought out for a bargain by some big name - IBM, HP, Red Hat, other another large distro company. Linux does need a top-notch file manager - and Nautilus showed promise (but from reports I've heard it wasn't quite there yet).

Unfortunately, as others have said, they had insufficient profit-making plans. As I browse through their web site, most desirable software and services are completely free (including free online storage space). This is obviously not the type of company that can survive on its own.

Instead, this company was creating a potentially essential project to many new and experienced Linux users (those willing to use a GUI at times instead of console). The companies to gain from this software are the Linux distributions themselves, because an excellent file manager is needed to help new *nix users get used to a non-Windows OS. Unfortunately, it would seem that the companies I hoped would take up the Eazel cause at a loss (the gain would be to help the parent project, not to make money as a branch division) did not. I would imagine that Eazel could have sold for quite a bargain - relatively (judging by the VC they used up, $11 million).

Perhaps this isn't true, or perhaps there's still time for some big company to step in and take up the development (after all, it is GPL, but it'd be nice to have the original dedicated developers too).

If a company fails to sponser this, it will only be a small amount of time before the open source volunteers take charge. We'll see what happens.

This is, of course, assuming the information is true.

Sad to see people lose jobs, but otherwise...

[Yam-Koo]

...I'm not really sad about anything else related to this.

I didn't like Nautilus. I've tried to get used to it, it's ALWAYS slower than command line for me, and I've only been using CLI for about 9 months.

I didn't like Eazel's attitude about distros other than Red Hat, especially early on when I was trying to get into the project. For the longest time during the preview phase, only RH6.2 binaries were available. It took a lot of effort to compile early Nautilus on non-RH systems.

I didn't like the totally half-hearted feel of everything in Nautilus. The .desktop issue, rejection of the Cut/Copy/Paste idea without any substitute, glitchy themes, millions (exaggerating) of processes, the "My Documents" wannabe folder, services that NEVER EVER worked on any of my systems (I didn't spent more than ~30minutes trying to get them to work, but why should I have to try?), few file managing tools (lots of sugary file browsing tools...).

I dunno. I can't claim to have produced much useful software myself. I do lots of bug reports and I give lots of feature feedback.

I sort of think that Nautilus became such a mixed up, inconsistant, gnarled project because it was so corporate and so under the gun. So many pieces of Nautilus seem like they're just self-justification of Eazel's existance. There are some decent features in Nautilus, I don't feel it's crap. There were SO MANY boneheaded problems along the way, though! It's just so sad to see something that could've been good, but was just planned so poorly and executed so hurriedly.

Anyway, I just hope people don't get the idea that Nautilus is the example of the rest of GNOME, and than the rest of GNOME is somehow gonna break down because they lost their newer file manager... there's PLENTY of great app development happening in GNOME, it'll become more apparent as GNOME gets closer to 2.0 and the piece's really start to come together.

Re:uh

[Billly Gates]

I actually met the main developers at Linux Expo in New York Last Winter and believe me they were clueless. I am not saying anything bad about it technically but here is my expereince.

I walk to the booth and immediately the guys with the tags from marketing quickly buzzed around me like fly's around a bowl of potato salid. I work for a finicial company according to me i.d. tag ( I do hardware support, not a stockbroker ) and they assumed I was an investor.

He mentioned how Eazel was going to take over and that even gnome-helix would fade away as Eazel would take gnome into the sunset.

I then asked him simply, how is eazel expected to make an income?

he replied, well netscape was free and made it big and we expect to make it big like netscape. Marc Anderson made millions of dollars off of netscape??? What the hell?

I mentioned to him that netscape was not free until microsoft began shooving its nose into the gorund with IE/Windows product tying. He then mentioned, well since gnome is going to be number one because sun and redhat said so, means nautulis is also going to be number one because were the best. ???

I was about ready to ask again for a more clean answer how Eazel was actually planning to make money and then a ral investor stood behind me so I did not want too piss anyone off so I nodded my head and walked aay in disbelief.

You mentioned that its a file manager and nothing else but the point is that it has no value. with helix you get constant updates and a few apps you would not get elsehere. With Natiulus you get uh wwll frankly natiulus.

Its a shame that a few brilliant software engineers can do something so stupid that even soneone wiht an i.q. of 80 can relise it was bound to failure.

I do not regret them going out of bussiness but I do fear that Microsoft will use this as proof that all free software is bound for failure.

I can see it now Steve Balmer: "Just look at linuxcare, turbolinux and now eazel, omg redhat may be next! Free software really doesn't work. See I told you so."

Sux,

[angry old man]

Back in my day, we didn't have nice friendly community businesses closing down to the greedy cut-throat ones. I guess it's a sign of the times all you young whipper-snappers.

Re:Good luck andy

[angry old man]

I agree with this young lad, that it is hard to make a dent on the OS, yet the Nautilus dent is big. I mean, look at me! I'm an 97 year old senile man and I can still use linux with the best of them. That's because my background comes from VAX systems in the late 60s (when I was still a senile old man).

All you young bucks think that you need a GUI file browser to make your system friendly and easy to use. Bagh! Major leaps in System useability didn't occur with the advent of the file browser. They occured when linefeed printers became Cathode Ray Tubes, and when Reel-to-reel tape drives became Cassettes or CD-Roms.

I'm angry, and I'm old, and the 2nd half of this post seems to contradict the first half, but that's just the viagra speaking.

Standard X desktop?

[infiniti99]

As many posts already have speculated, maybe KDE will become the standard X desktop? Eazel was a very important piece of GNOME, and surely their absence will be quite a blow to the project. This really sucks for the GNOME users and developers. But what can you do?

Anyway, I know it's depressing for these people, and I don't think the GNOME developers are going to just throw in the towel, but I began pondering what unix would be like if KDE were the only desktop to worry about. Sure, there would be other window managers, but KDE would be the only desktop environment / component framework to deal with. This would solve the problem that commercial developers face when they have to "choose which desktop to develop for."

In the past there was CDE, and KDE was supposed to be the replacement. It's been quite a history since, and the whole QT licensing fiasco plus GNOME's rise would make an interesting bedtime story. Perhaps it is time for KDE to finally reach its goal?

-Justin

Is Gnome next?

[wrinkledshirt]

Heh, I guess all my karma are belong to your -1, Flamebaits... Please don't take this as a troll, though. I'm genuinely concerned.

KDE has spent a great deal of time building a GUI desktop suite with little to no corporate involvement. KDE is already up to their second generation desktop, working with a toolkit that's at its third generation, has bragging rights on arguably the most esteemed web browser Linux has right now. They've built their own development IDE based on C++ (arguably the most popular development language for large-scale projects). They've even got mindshare in the annoying but effective branding sense -- nobody's going to mistake any of their projects as being from anybody else, thanks to that K at the beginning of everything.

The Gnome foundation can drop a lot of names. They've got a so-so toolkit (and before you tell me otherwise, try programming with it) that was based off a Photoshop clone and has had widgets undergo major (ie: developer's nightmare) changes from 1.0 to 1.2 to the proposed 2.0. They've got many divergent projects, no complete Office Suite, and have a FILE MANAGER as their flagship product. They haven't reached their second generation of desktop yet, and while that might be (and probably everyone's going to argue is) because they have a different set of standards, I don't think anybody can sit there and say with a straight face that the Gnome foundation has been pumping out the software in the same volume that KDE has. Furthermore, they keep changing names (Gnome->Helixcode->Ximian->What Next?).

I hate to say this, but it really looks like the Gnome foundation has been playing open-source politics whereas the folks at KDE have been diligently working on software. I don't want to hear about GUADEC, I don't want to read about Miguel getting political when Linuxplanet criticizes the Foundation, I DO want to see some coding coming out of these boys. They should have a more polished product by now, given the amount of corporate support that they're getting, and it's not like the community hasn't been encouraging.

And another thought, why don't one of these two (or both) take the chance on rolling its own distribution? That could open up revenue streams that neither really has access to. And that's real revenue (sales, support & service contracts, printed documentation), not just investment- or donation-based. Plus, they could tailor aspects of their distribution to match their GUI desktop, and would probably be able to get a user-friendly distro faster than anybody. KLinux? If buying a copy would support those guys, I might just do it. I don't know if I'd bother buying a Gnome Linux, though. They look like they've secured enough funding for now. Let's just hope that something's left when it runs out.

Early Eazel Experiences

[lwagner]

Back in early 2000, when I alarmedly learned that Eazel was developing "just" a file manager, I faxed Bud Tribble about the possibility of developing/using something like GNUstep instead because it had roots with NeXTSTEP and MOSX. At that time, it seemed like one could tap into the marketable aspect of similar API's. Apple had just announced the layering of MOSX with Darwin; it seemed like an interesting thing, particularly because Tribble was from NeXT and Andy et al. were from 0ld sk00l Apple.

Tribble responded intelligently, which showed me that, although the idea was (of course) a pipedream, he actually had heard of the technologies enough to talk about it. For me, I think, that's the difference in my mind between Eazel and the normal dot-com carnage - the Eazelites are geeks who got caught up in the 99-00 goldrush and were burned. We can fault them severely for that, but I think that, collectively in the community, there seems to be a very silent sense of respect for what they tried to do.

The Emperor's New Clothes

[Fat Casper]

Some time ago Eazel sent two guys on tour, and they came and spoke at our LUG, gave out a few Eazel tote bags, etc. I didn't get it. I really felt like an idiot. I don't work with computers, I've just been playing with them at home forever. I'm not really a part of the culture, and the first I had heard of Eazel or Nautilus was when I walked in the door and read the sign announcing the speakers.

Everyone was excited that they had come to us, so I figured they were something big and I was just some dolt living in a cave or something. I listened raptly and watched while they navigated and tweaked on the overhead, looking for what I was missing. I understood that the browser was free, and what they were selling was a subscription sercice. The only problem is that I don't need another browser (although I do like my file manager and web browser to be different apps) and I can't see Linux types being suckered into a subscription service.

I walked out of the meeting very confused. Everyone was happy with the presentation and I couldn't see through the hype. Rather I thought I was failing to see through the hype. It didn't occur to me that there was nothing to see beyond it. Open Source types (even the .com flops that give the movement a bad name in the business world) not being on my list of people to whom I bear ill will, I'm still relieved to see Eazel go. I feel sorry for the workers, I even kind of feel sorry for the founders. I don't feel sorry for the funders. What I really feel is closure. I can say no, it's not just me. Good luck in all your future endeavors, guys, but please think them through.

Shame....

[Techfocus]

I thought Eazel was pretty decent, but as with everything internet, it seems that the bloodshed continues without mercy.

Has anyone else that works in the valley noticed the drop in commute time? I've shaved 15 minutes off in the past 3 months.

On Men and Casettes

[blang]

Apropos Casettes, while we are cruising on memory lane: I remember back when I was a pimple face and the prowd owner of a 48K ZK Spectrum from Sinclair, back in 1984 or so. The storage medium was casette, and you could save or load files by recording to or playing back from any tape recorder.

The cool thing was that I could exchange programs with a buddy of mine over the telephone, by cracking open the handset and attaching the speaker/mic wires to the appropriate Spectrum wires. I'd hit Save, my friend hit Load, and in 5 minutes or less we could transfer up to 48K. I had never heard about a modem, BBS, internet, datacomm or anything like that. Seems pretty lame now, but back then I thought we were very clever.