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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.
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, 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.
That, or you could admit that the trust the KDE team placed in Trolltech was just.
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.
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.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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
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
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?
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.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
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
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)
Yea, my boss helped me reduced my commute time to zero.
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.
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...I'm not really sad about anything else related to this.
.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 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
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.
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.
-vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
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
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.
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.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.