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Eazel Shutting Down, Nautilus Will Continue
1010011010 pointed out this follow-up email from Darin Adler about the future of various projects maintained by former Eazel employees, including Nautilus, gnome-vfs, and various libraries, as well as bugtracking and other necessities.
Shutting down is never a happy event, but it's gratifying to see email from Andy Hertzfeld (also on the gnome-hackers list) in which he says: "I just want to reaffirm my personal commitment to the continuing development of Nautilus, the GNOME platform and free software in general. I plan to keep working hard to make free software easier to use and I'm still optimistic that our work can make a big difference to millions of users."
rexlam indicates this story from cnet on the shutdown as well. Best of luck to everyone at Eazel.
Let's replace it with a foot with four toes.
Mandrake, (which you can get for free) has the KOffice suit, yes, you can explore the hd with file manager, and you can play Quake3. Macs, i cant speak for them.
I hope this answers your question
They would also be able to release Nautilus under another license, as well, I believe.
BTW, Today (Tuesday), was perhaps the biggest day yet for commercial Linux software, as Opera for Linux is now complete.
simple. none of us. by us, i mean the brunt of /.
we *are not who the software is designed for*
it was not meant for Joe *nix, Joe SysAdmin.
If Eazel hoped to make money by selling services, then their focus should of been on the Windows platform. With around 90% of the desktop market, it is the logical target.
One useful service would be packaging, installing and updating GPL'd and other Free
Let's face it, Linux does not have the desktop user base yet to support something like Eazel's services. And by getting millions of Windows users to try Free software we would be getting exposure, increasing name recognition, and gaining trust. Instead of taking Microsoft's word (FUD really) on what Free software is, users would be capable of forming their own opinion based on experience.
I believe that for Linux to win over the desktop market, Free software must first gain the trust and loyalty of the Windows users. How can this happen? I see two possible paths (or a combination of both).
One way is through the success of OpenOffice. Once it is a truly viable alternative to Microsoft Office, the tides will turn. No longer dependent on MS Office, its draconian licenses and everchanging formats, OpenOffice will be the bridge between Windows and Linux.
A second way is through WINE and other emulators. I don't believe in the argument that emulators will stop software companies from writing native code for Linux. What is the mantra of Microsoft? Embrace and extend. The same way that Microsoft was able to destroy Netware by first being compatible with it, Linux should be compatible with Windows. It lowers the bar for current Windows users, and it also gets us a lot of new software quickly. Compatibility is a good thing.
Of *course* it's not the economy. Do you think the executives who write these statements actually believe them?! ;-]
;-]
Do you actually expect a company to post, "Because we grossly overspent, ran our business like a Free Software non-proit, had an inflexible business plan that failed to adapt for a changing venture climate, and retained incompetent staff in several key positions, we burned through $15 million in venture capital and couldn't get anymore." ?
Such executives would not be likely to receive venture funding for their future ventures.
Something to think about, and thanks for the great work.
I would hate to see the efforts on GNOME get trapped in litigation or legal slowdowns.
Peace.
First off, thank you Eazel for giving us possibly the best file manager you find for *NIX systems. I greatly appreciate it.
Second, you're a great bunch of guys (I followed the mailing lists vigorously) and I sincerely wish you all the best luck in your career.
Third, I'm extremely happy that work is being continued by a lot of people at Eazel *in their free time*. Thank you.
But since that's all been said before I'd like to point out that this is a tragic but positive movo for Linux desktop development.
1) Rid the FM of Eazel's dodgy services. I say dodgy because let's face it, no one is going to upload their stuff to a central server. If I needed access, I'd set up a server at home and leave it connected to the net. Get rid of the company logo up the top!!!
2) down the bottom there's a follow-up by none other than Miguel. I bet Ximian is going to use Eazel's code in their distribution. Ximian wins, we all win. This is finally the merger we've been working for
In retrospect, this was a daring company that took a risk. Everyone know they wouldn't succeed, but they left us with a great product and made Linux/Free *NIX scene so much more intresting.
again, thanks
VCs don't like to get burned. They firmly believe in the principle "fool me once, shame on you....fool me twice, shame on me."
Look at what Eazel has done, then look at all the hype that surrounded them. These were the folks who were going to prove once and for all how making money with a 100% GPL story is possible. The press loved them; GNOME uses swooned at their feet; companies invested in them...
Now, put on those 20/20 hindsight goggles and take another look. What the hell did they deliver? After all this time, they have a 3/4 baked file manager that has some funky preview features and that crashes every third or fourth time it's run. In spite of the hype and the ridiculous funding they got, a single file manager seemed to be outside of the realm of possibility. I'm sure they'd have eventually delivered a great product, but just as with VA, when you shoot up high quickly you just hit the ground harder when the parachute blows a hole.
I have sympathy for the talented engineers that were employed by Eazel. Great cause; seriously flawed business model. I saw it right up front. I never did buy into the hype, nor did I think that their business model had anything revolutionary going for it. I'm not at all surprised to see them crash. It's sad. They should have remained a group of interested hackers instead of allowing themselves to be hyped like they were. 100% give-everything-away stories don't work, folks. The bubble has burst. Free software mustmustMUST be combined with pay services and proprietary software for a business to survive.
Now I have evidence to back up the things I've been saying for years. I'm a free software and open source fanatic, but at least I'm a REALISTIC free software and open source fanatic. Business need to make money. Eazel must have figured that so many people would want to get automated updates of Nautilus that they'd have a sustainable growth. Yeah, right. The customers who would use Nautilus are technical enough to use Ximian's update tools, Red Hat's update tools, or simple FTP downloads and RPM/APT/whatever. This is what happens when starry eyed programmers jump into a new market without looking first.
Once again we see another troubled dot-com blaming its problems on the economy and lack of investment, rather than the obvious: they're not making money and they have never had any realistic (or even coherent) ideas on how to start making money. That investors are no longer willing to throw dollars at you merely because you're in the software business is sign that rational thought has returned to the capital markets, not that those markets have dried up.
Well, if you want to make money on the services, then if I were eazel - I wouldn't release a 1.0 version without all the services infrastrcture embedded into it - including the ability to pay for services - and offer some services...
Unfortunately - seems that Eazel forgot that idea...
Oh well, maybe next company will learn from those mistakes
Hetz (Heunique)
Gee, then I wonder why it works perfectly under Konqueror 2.2 beta 1..
On mozilla 0.9 it doesn't, however. just crashes..
Hetz (Heunique)
Oh yeah, commited...
So, in case some developers just accidently got hired by another company, or they are getting tired from the zillion bug reports - and you can trust that to bring Nautilus to Gnome 2.0??
Well, I wish them the best, although I wouldn't count on that...
Hetz (Heunique)
Why do all these companies with questionable business models get boatloads of venture capital and open offices in Sillicon Valley?
It seems to me like Eazel should not have needed an office at all, at least not until Nautilus was about done and they were seriously set to launch services. They should have found several good hackers and paid them to work from home.
Seriously. Telecommuting has so many advantages that it just plain hurts trying to figure out why so many employers are opposed to it.
Why don't you have sympathy for the developers? They got a cool job and were paid to do work they enjoy. But now they're out of a paying job.
I can see not having sympathy for the VCs and PHBs, but developers?
I don't think you read the whole story.
NAUTILUS IS NOT DEAD!!! The developers are committed to continuing it.
Show of hands... how many would have paid money for any of their services?
(I posted this last time, but way too late in the thread for anyone to see it. I am actually curious.)
That was a safe bet. VA Linux has a revenue stream and some good products. If they can survive this recession (and I think they can), their stock should get back to $20-$30 within the next couple years.
There is one huge problem with all this -- it's extremely hard to write any decent software for Windows platform, free or not. And it's even harder to keep it portable, especially if one hopes to use Wine/winelib or other such thing instead of full-blown native port (ex: WP 2000 vs. Opera 5.0 on Linux). One of problem with Mozilla is that too much of Windows-derived ideas were placed into it, causing unnecessary bloat. So there are reasons why there isn't much free software for Windows, and among those reasons idiosyncrasy or bigotry aren't even on the top of the list.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's easy to write trivial and shitty software for Windows -- complex GUI that leads to trivial operations, incremental enhancements for office applications' functionality that isn't of much use in the first place, unreliable programs that no one knows why they work or crash because a lot of API is undocumented and all convoluted, etc. Writing software with any noticeably useful functionality in Windows is extremely hard -- networking is not designed for anything that requires performance, nonblocking processing model can't be implemented efficiently, IPC is rudimentary, so everything has to use threads and complex data model that is required for multithreaded program even if it isn't needed on any other system.
Even for things that Windows does more or less ok, programmer has to follow the design that doesn't make much sense, and often things can't be done unless programmer lets Windows lead his way of thinking, often in a very inefficient and convoluted manner, like in the case of anything that uses COM and its relatives. This also creates another problem -- programmer that worked on Windows for a long period of time has to accept pieces of Windows design, and continues writing "Windows programs" on all other systems, and then gets surprised that the design decisions that worked well on Windows are harder to implement on everything else, or result has an abysmal performance. When pointed out that anything Unixlike is based on completely different ideas, and there are efficient VM and scheduler, pipes and various kinds of sockets, unified file descriptors and other useful features at his disposal, he can't wrap his mind around this even if solution is simple, and will cry a river about the lack of COM, registry and other bullshit.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Good luck, Team Eazel, wherever you may end up in the real world.
I'd rather have the other way around: company up, nautilus sinking. Nautilus is an heresy on the Unix way of life. Maybe Apple will hire all these guys to live by open source (as opposed to free software, open source == rip everything from the world, charge if the world wants anything back, possibly with IP lawsuits on the way) and develop new ways to make OS X suck.
I think this is an obvious case of "It takes one to know one".
We really don't need Yet Another GPL vs. BSD Flamewar.
IBM is not really interested in Linux as a desktop (yet). They are willing to help Apache, and they are very willing to make sure that Linux on their big iron has all of the enterprise features that it needs (journaling filesystem, etc.), but so far they have only improved Linux in areas where it already was being used.
In short, IBM is using Linux mostly as a weapon against Sun, and not Microsoft. They have got much better uses for their $1 Billion than trying to save a file manager (that will probably do just fine without the help).
Uh... That's almost precisely what I meant. So far Microsoft has mostly been immune to the current stock market tech devaluations. They still have a very high Price/Earnings ratio, and they are still using stock options as a primary employee incentive. Maintaining their stock price in an era where PC sales are down (and where their premier OS has had lackluster sales) is quite a feat. My hat is off to them.
Eazel burned through millions of dollars, in about a year, creating a file manager. This is not generally the sort of thing that the government or a charitable organization tend to sponsor.
This doesn't mean that it isn't a good idea for charitable organizations or the government to sponsor Free Software. After all, both of these groups need inexpensive software too. The difference is that the developers working on a project for either the government or a charitable foundation don't normally drive fancy sports cars, or have offices in Silicon valley. Eazel raised a fair amount of cash for their idea, and then they proceeded to spend the money on marketing, office space, etc. before they had a saleable product.
At the time they probably figured that they would be able to attract more venture capital. They were wrong, and now Eazel is no more (but Nautilus will live on).
The individual hackers will be fine, the folks that invested in Eazel, however, are not likely to ever invest in a Free Software venture again. Not that it matters. I personally am not convinced that it takes that type of money to develop a quality product. KDE seems to be progressing quite well without that sort of capital, and most of the software I use everyday operates with a much lower budget than the folks at Eazel.
Microsoft is too busy trying to keep their stock from collapsing to care much about one single company that employed a handful of hackers. Especially since these hackers have already managed to release their source code under the GPL. Ninety percent of all new businesses fail. That's why it's called "venture" capital.
Free software was alive and well long before the corporations had any interest, and it takes a lot less money to sustain a Free Software project than it does to build a proprietary one. Especially when your customers are feeling the pinch of a recession and are deciding that perhaps now is not the time to upgrade.
Not a problem. If it was released under the GPL, and you downloaded it in binary form, then simply request the source. They are legally obliged to give it to you. Of course, this only applies to the earlier GPL-licensed versions, and not to the current version.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Well, and then representatives of such country come to Eastern Europe and want to teach us democracy talking loudly about freedom, rights, ...
hany
I can't understand why anybody would consider any technique for naming information sources that does not cause open/close/seek to be able to manipulate those sources. Requiring this "vfs library" goes completely against the Unix design.
I would much rather see effort going into creating such easy to use programming interfaces, rather than these huge bloated libraries with interfaces that make MicroSoft's stuff look acceptable, and copies of MicroSofts rather lame ideas for GUI. The killer apps are going to come out of some teenager's basement, but only if the power in the system is accessible by mortals, and this is only going to happen if it is simple enough to be understood without years of study.
Big name, no-business-plan failures hurt small companies in the open-source world who *do* have a business plan. It's still common to "start-up" with hopes of VC funding to get you through development to profitability. When the VC's get burned on other open-source companies, the funding dries up, even for legitimate companies who made the "mistake" of allying themselves with the open-source movement.
-Scott Hutton
Emblems are _very_ useful.
Nautilus 1.0.2 works wonderfully, even on small systems (at least it works well on my PII-200 64M). 1.0.3 apparently is even zippier.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I don't know of any that have been withdrawn, but many are licensed under more restrictive licenses to others (QT being an example) who don't want to participate in the community. Because they own the copyright, they can do this.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Nautilus runs better for me than GMC. Did you use the Ximian release or another one? My machine is only a PII-200 w/ 64M.
Also, Gtk+ isn't dependent on Gnome or KDE, either. I hate Motif with a passion. Mozilla 0.9 with Galeon 0.10.6 is a rockin combination. Try it out! Although, Galeon does require Gnome.
Engineering and the Ultimate
They were talking about Exchange _server_. Currently there is no free one, nor can Ximian currently provide a complete solution, since they don't control any of these apps.
Engineering and the Ultimate
This is not entirely true. This would only be true if the binary included the GPL license. Otherwise, they can release it under any license they choose, even if they have released the source code under the GPL.
Engineering and the Ultimate
There was an opportunity for Eazel, but not as a file manager/GNOME shell with a vague "sell online services" model. The Eazel team, in a more sane VC climate than existed when they were initially funded (in the peak of the Linux craze), could have been a piece of a more diverse, well-funded Linux packaging company (RedHat comes immediately to mind). Or they could have gone the extra step, and built a Eazel-branded distro, using Nautilus as the maintenance toolkit.
The "average" users out there are still waiting for a easy to install, easy to maintain, and easy to update distro that's stable, doesn't generate odd, spurious errors on occasion, and can be set up as easily as Windows on most hardware (Windows may have it's faults once it's up, but it is easy to install). Eazel could have gone down that path and made Nautilus the cornerstone of a whole new distribution, but they passed up the opportunity - or worse, they didn't even see it as an opportunity.
There are a lot of ways to make money in the Linux distro biz - it's pretty easy to be big and corporate, like RedHat, Caldera, or SuSE. Those companies are large enough to have diversified revenue streams, multiple products, and a services business that they can draw ongoing revenue from. There's also a nice niche that can be taken up by small, "garage" companies, where a couple of smart people with no VC funding can make a good living selling and/or servicing Linux.
And if you look at how the big software projects are organized, the only reason a lot of the entities exist is to provide legal shelter to the project tems who hack on it - the KDE Foundation and Debian are great examples of that. Ximian has a goal to make money from GNOME - hopefully they can, but I wouldn't count on it. Their best hope as a company is to get underwritten by the folks who benefit from their code (like RedHat, Sun, etc.) - and make enough to pay their hackers.
Eazel was aimed smack-dab in the squishy middle, trying to make a garage business out of VC money. In hindsight, it was doomed from the start, even before the market crashed.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
My concern is that this perception will go straight into the the Open Source FUD Handbook: "How do Open Source Developers make money? By scamming VC investors. Certainly not by selling free software."
-dwd-
That was actually just a theme. The Eazel theme is what contains the logo in that place, and Ximian either didn't include it at all, or just made the other theme the default. I'm pretty sure the help text contains the Eazel logo, though.
-dwd-
Lets get this clear first, Nautilus is a great and beautiful product. In my book both are important.
In March 2001, Eazel laid off 40 employees, paring itself down to 35. Even at its height, there were 13 out of 15 developers on Nautilus paid for by Eazel. So there were 60 other people in this company. Ok so estimate 5 execs, 5 graphic designers, 5 marketing and sales(they werent selling anything yet), 3 sysadmins, 7 customer support, 5 administrative, and we get to 30 more people. Obviously at no time did they seem to need to be more than 45 people (though 3,2,2,2,2,2 =13 more = 28 total which is what they got down to seems more realistic).
They got 11 million in March 2000, 1 year at 100,000 per employee for 75 employees ate 7.5 million straight, leaving 3.5 million+founders investments. At 30, they would probably still have had another year to try and validate their business model, or be acquired.
So I get the feeling that their burn rate was too high, too dot-commy, and that lead to their going under. Of course its easier to say this in hindsight, but they probably expected to clinch a second round easy. They should have been warned by last april's crash.
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
Yeah, except for two problems:
1. they didn't have a clear idea what these services should be.
2. there wasn't any reason why they would be better at providing these services than anyone else.
They didn't have a real business plan. They had some cool technical ideas, a lot of code, and mock-business-plan which helped get VC funding.
While RMS considers BSD a free licence, he doesn't recommend people use any non-copyleft licence as it allows people to make proprietary versions without giving back to the community, essentially removing the freedom.
--
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
Amen
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
And where is the Exchange clone for linux? Yup, there is none. I wonder if m$ would kill any company who even tried...
Evoltion Mailer is no exchange compatible. The whole point is a product to replace outlook exchange client, and still connect to the exchange server. IF I wanted an alternative groupware, I could use star office.
You can download HP Openmail from the HP website.
But there is no Exchange Client clone, thats what a freeware unix office clone needs!
Open source and business were never compatible and that was being stated clearly by realists way back in the .COM heyday. It has absolutely nothing to do with a "recession", but rather time ticking by and venture capital funds drying up as people got a little more rational.
That's exactly what I meant. The longer the economy isn't full of venture capitalists with money to burn the more "professional" distos for open source projects will suffer.
Good point, and if you had said a "recession of VC funds" I would absolutely agree. However the drying up of VC funds is the result of realism setting in rather than any universal economic condition. VCs could dump $ into companies with hypothetical visions of grandeur in the future for only so long before either the pursuit starts paying off, or they pull out. The vast majority of investments didn't pay off (anything but) so the VCs have mostly taken a wait and see attitude (not to mention that lots of them are short many millions of dollars).
Absolute stock price is (mostly) irrelevant due to stock splitting, etc.
Yup very true. Indeed I gave the wrong impression when I said that they were doing well at $68 (which implied that I meant that value $68 was inherently a good number), which in my mind was in relation to a peek of $120 during the heyday, and a multi-year low of around $50.
Microsoft is too busy trying to keep their stock from collapsing to care much about one single company that employed a handful of hackers.
Keep their stock from collapsing? While Microsoft got pulled into the whirlwind of bizarre valuations of a little over a year ago, their stock has gone through remarkably well. In fact given that this is a company that has a massive federal judgement against them and countless other legal issues on the docket, I'd say their $68+ stock price is remarkably good.
The license itself is copyright the FSF, and the FSF asks that you release the copyright to them (because there as evil as anyone else), but GPLd software isnt necessaraly FSF/GNU copyrighted/
The Lotus Notes wire protocol dates back to the mid-80s and has about 10 layers of cruft on top and at least appears to be highly dependant on Notes' document database format. Reverse Engineering it would be unlikely at best -- Probably better to just write a wrapper around the portable Notes C libraries and pay IBM their client seat $ (which if you are using Notes, you probably are doing anyway).
Reverse engineering Exchange is probably just as icky. The first step would to create a free OSF DCE-compatible (and therefore MS-compatible) RPC library. Some Samba folks might be working on this, but nothing yet. Then you would need to figure out what ungodly pipe-filling garbage Exchange/Outlook uses to talk.
It's not my time and effort, but I wouldn't bother. It would be much more effective to build an open source replacement for Exchange/Domino, in particular the calendar and the mail routing functionality. Most of the groupware apps could be better done on a web system with mySQL or whatever.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
That said, I happen to know a lot of well established entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and investment bankers, and everyone is saying the same thing: the private equity markets are some of the toughest that they've seen in 20 years. Qualitatively, it is a matter of fact that the private equity markets have dropped below levels not seen in many years.
Combine this with the fact that there are many more companies competing for the same pie, and you will find many good privately held companies that will have a very rough time finding enough cash.Even for good companies, this can make the difference between survival and death, or, even more often, lost opportunities.
In addition, there is a certain herd mentality seen in the venture capital business where things are viewed from a bi-polar perspective, it's either hot or it's sell, sell, sell. You can be a very good company, with very experienced managment, an excellent product, etc, with one or two setbacks [often nothing to do with the company itself, but with failing competitors in the same industry], and the VCs will not touch you, especially today. [Despite the fact that they're investing in much poorer companies at the same time].
In short, it's not so black and white. Yes, lots of good bad companies are finally getting their just reward (failure). But some good companies are suffering, and will suffer, as a result of recent events.
Eazel got started in 1999 at some point, iirc. So, that is almost 3 years. If your business model hasnt proven itself in any capacity after 3 years it is doubtful it will do it at 5, 10, or whenever.
Eazels problem was not that it was underfunded. It was overfunded if you ask me. They didn't do the "Lets do the most we can do for the cheapest ammount". They hired in suits way to early which took away from development costs. There were a lot of mistakes that I think Eazel did through their lifespan.
But, I'm sorry, a service-driven for-pay network managing your packages through a Mac-ish (Sorry Andy, you shouldn't have left Apple) file manager is not a good business plan. It's not going to make money. It's a great idea, but why would a company pay a service fee when they already have to hire a sysadmin who has the knowledge to spend the extra 2.5 minutes to download the package or tarball and run the necessary commands against it.
I think that Eazel was a great idea for a software project, maybe even a subdivision of a "real" company (One that has been in existence and makes money) but as a company the concept was flawed.
And.. I doubt most their investors did understand the companies business model. It's effective marketing to them, why else do you think JustBalls.com exists? (not perverse, I promise)
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
If you piss people off, and they have a gun they will shoot at you anywhere. Not just the west. It's in the east, center, top, bottom, and inside out.
You are blowing it way out of proportion anyway. The only type of person that would shoot you for a bumper sticker is a psychopath which happens everywhere.
I have had friends get shot, mugged, etc. Not once has it ever been because of a bumper sticker or their viewpoints. The reason why people get pissed is because most "liberals" aren't content with just being liberal. A lot that I know deem it their quest to impose their beliefs onto other people. My guess is that is you. (Read back what you have been writing) - And, if you came around spouting that you are gonna get shot because your viewpoints and we're all just a bunch of backwards conservative salmon killing beasts I'd shoot your ass too. Damn, just reading your slashdot posts I want to load my rifle up and give a good "Yeehaw" -- not because your viewpoints, because of your blatant I'm Right and if you dont see that you are just stupid attitude.
Besides, out of all the people that are murdered in Oregon it's just a fraction of what happens in New York City.
On a side note...
Medford is also fairly liberal, as is Ashland (Ashland is probably more liberal than Eugene). My guess is you can't even tell me what the name of the mall is in Medford. You talk a lot of shit, but you dont know your head from your ass to back it up.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I dont want to hurt you because you are daring to speak. I want to hurt you because you are shit talking where I came from.
How would you feel about me if I told you your mother was a crack-smoking whore? Probably not too great. You are talking about my friends, and a good portion fo my family. You are talking shit.
Of course I'm not going to like your dumb ass. It's not that hard to figure out. We dont dislike you because of your view points or because you are speaking about them. We dislike you because you constantly say that us oregonian conservative westerners aren't really able to understand because we're a bunch of hill billy cross burning mother fuckers.
If you knew anything of Ashland you would know it's not liberal because of it's college. Considering SOSC is a fairly conservative school (With one of the best forensic departments in the US) it has little impact onto the life style of Ashland.
I'll give you a little example of how a bumper sticker could get you hurt up in Oregon. Say you have a "Fire the Loggers, we dont need em" bumper sticker on your tree.. and a bunch of guys walk by who are or are friends with loggers and they see you getting into or out of your car. Obviously they are going to start yelling shit at you. You have the right to express your point of view in the manner you see fit - they will call you an idiot.
This is where your dumbass can't just go, "Hey, they have their point of view just like I have" - nope, you have to go off about how they're hostility is because they are conservative inbreds who just want to shoot signs. Yeah, I can see why your buddies get their asses kicked.
You are just missing the point to the fact that Oregonians are much quickly to kick some ass of some out-of-towner who automatically decides to smart off and talk shit.
I'm not sure why you think I said what I said because of your viewpoints. You have a right to think what you want to think. I have a right to want to bitch slap the living shit out you because you are a loud, annoying, clueless, fuck.
You are the reason why people think that way about Oregonians. If you actually experienced this yourself instead of listening to urban legends and then redistributing them you'd have a totally different viewpoint.
Some facts for you: Klamath Falls had the highest violent crime rate per capita in Oregon (Not sure of now, but as of 1996). We were 7th, on the list. All of which were "Liberal" states. So, you dont know what the hell you are talking about.
Next time you talk shit about an entire region, why dont you go get some facts to back up your claims. As for your buddies who had their car vandalized or their lives taken - why dont you supply links to news stories, or maybe some more detailed information. Oh wait, I can tell you why. Because it was a figment of your imagination.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Thanks for making my point that you are just a clueless punk assuming everyone is out to get you cause you are "different".
Paranoia is a sign of mental illness, go get checked if you seriously think everyone is out to get you and you can't express your views.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
- First of all after a few years of studying Gracie Juie Jitsu I don't ever get the shit
beat out of me.
Yes, I usually do fear those who can't even spell the martial art correctly. It's Jiu Jitsu, and I've studdied it too. Along with Tae Kwon Do, and Aikido. Shove it up your ass Mr. Wannabe-Martial-Artist. More talk from you, dont you ever get tired of spewing shit you dont have any clue about?Let me tell you this one more time: Oregonians do not hate you if you are (gay|environmentalist|vegetarian|wiccan)
There is a small facet of the west that still does actively participate in hateful activities but you know what? Everywhere has such groups.
Oregonians are some of the friendliest bunch of people. You toured Oregon, big fucking deal. You dont know shit about Oregon or any of these so called demon filled conservative states.
You are no better than those people you claim fill the west. You hate these people for what? Because they dont agree with your viewpoint? Name one person, and link to a news article (Even my small home town has their news paper online) that you know who was killed in Oregon over their beliefs. Let me save you some help, you can't.
As for your "Hillbilly Choke hold" it's more evidence you really have no clue as to what the hell you are talking about. Let me give you a little bit of help (more help.. you still need so much) - after 7 seconds of a proper choke hold (2nd year Jiu Jitsu in case you really want to go learn it) your opponent will "black out" - still be conscious but eye sight goes away, sense of balance goes off. After 10 seconds they typically are unconscious. No new blood to the brain usually causes a lot of trauma after the next 20 seconds or so. The "proper" chokehold pushes on the two arteries running up the side of the next with the crux of the elbow blocking the passage. Of course, you already knew that with your "Juie Jitsu".. rofl.
Go back to school, and learn how to be a convincing liar. Cause right now you are failing miserably.
Considering Oregon hosts a natural wonder of the world, along with the largest waterfall in the United States I'd say there is a lot to see there. BTW, no one wants to beat you up because your liberal. They want to beat you up because you are a liar.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
To those who claim that Eazel was naive and foolish and had no hope of ever being profitable, I have this to say. They may have been naive, only in the sense that they didn't think it would as hard as it was to find investers with some foresight. One of the big problems was the fallout of the dot coms--whether you believe it or not. Most of these dot coms never had a prayer and most didn't really have anything to offer that would turn a profit. I can see how one could look at Eazel and say that all they delivered was a file manager and some services that no one would really pay for. However, the real shot at profitability is far more long term than that. What Eazel was betting on was changing the face of desktop computing--betting that they and the other gnome developers could produce a desktop, development environment and platform that users would really embrace en masse. That is a long term goal. At that point, they, along with others (Ximian, Red Hat, etc.) would be in position to leverage their expertise in a profitable manner. If, hypothetically, Gnome ran on 75% of desktops right now, do you think Eazel, with it's talented resources, knowledge, innovation, vision, would be closing it's doors? To me that's a no-brainer. It's a long-term investment, full of risks, but it's that level of commitment to free software that Andy Hertzfeld and the others at Eazel have had from the beginning. And while they couldn't find resources with the funding/vision to partner with them for the long haul, they are as commited now as ever. Hats off to all of them. I'm not saying they didn't make any mistakes as a company or couldn't have had a better plan on how to get to their long-term goal--that's going to be the ongoing challenge for the next few years for companies banking on free software--but damnit, their model/vision was not fundamentally flawed. We are present in the beginning, really, of a change in paradigms for software/service delivery.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Oh, hogwash. GNOME existed before Ximian and will exist after Ximian, probably run by the same coders. Also with several UNIX(tm) vendors planning to replace CDE with GNOME there is a finantial incentive to keep GNOME development going strong.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
What part of the country do you live in? I'm in Texas and I believe that "liberal" is too conservative of a term for my own beliefs. I generally have to keep my mouth shut since I'm surrounded by extremely close minded people that worship the Republican party. There are plenty of free-thinking people here in the large city. I have lived in small Texas towns, and I think you're okay as long as you don't intentionally offend people.
Uhhh. I've lived in Texas all of my life so I believe I know what I'm talking about. There are certain pockets that are known to be more open (Austin and ummm, uhhh El Paso?), but the rest of the Texas IS close-minded. I know. I've lived in small towns, large cities, East Texas forests, West Texas, Panhandle highlands (heh), etc.
I realize that I'm making a very broad generalization and I don't mean to badmouth Texas. I'm native Texan and probably won't ever move out (been here 30 years, not counting a stint in OK) because I love the state and the people that live here, but come on - I know what it's like here!
BTW, the portion that didn't vote and happened to possibly agree with me probably didn't do so because it's hopeless. If you don't vote a straight Repub ticket in Texas, you're wasting your time. (Yes, I did vote)
I'm not talking about anywhere outside of Texas. I have actually been outside of the state, and I'm not sure just what you're trying to prove - that your view is somehow better than mine?
goodbye.
It would probably be illegal like if he 'sold' the
company's computers to his parents for $1.
I believe Eazel couldn't succeed because their business model was actually a duplication of already existing functionality, especially their software catalogue Debian's dpkg.
While they could have created their own Debian distribution focusing on ease of use, enhanced Debian itself and made many things in the service space, they have chosen to duplicate much of the Debian infrastructure. But as Debian matures and GNU/Linux users learn that what they get paying for Eazel catalogue or Red Hat Network they can get for free from Debian, this business model dries, and not only for Eazel.
--
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra
DBA, SysAdmin
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
What bites about this (about the software product "Nautilus"), exactly? Sure, it bites that a company couldn't make it good and people are out of work, but Nautilus is OPEN SOURCE and so it will not die a steaming death like its founding company has.
Anybody and everybody is free to keep on working and using Nautilus as they see fit. There might be a lull for a bit as new developers will take time to get up to speed, but if this product has potential then I wouldn't be too worried about its future.
There's similar VC funded ventures now being operated from a Mexican beach.
Where should I send my resume?
cpeterso
Doh!
You're right of course... For some reason I looked at the page and parsed the tgz as source.
However... if you REALLY want this source, during the time it was opensource, it was supposedly hosted at Sourceforge (project id: wedit), which may have backups. Given the nature of what happened, someone who really wants to reopen that project might be able to talk to the people at Sourceforge to restore from backup.
And yes, this is somewhat offtopic, *but* - it's a good example that GPL code does *not* always survive.
References:0 420 ff0:sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php%3Ff orm_cat%3D15%26discrim%3D45,196+wedit+sourceforge& hl=en
http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/00-10-
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:131d2854eb80
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The fourth link on google when searching for "wedit source" gives you a link which leads here.
That's http://www.q-software-solutions.com/weditlinux/dow nload.php3 for the paranoid (just look in your statusbar!). It's also mirrored at a few other places.
More on topic, GhostScript is (or at least was) released commercially, and the version n months old is released to GPL.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I like this new net order:
1) Get an idea
2) Fake a business plan
3) Get VC funding
4) Use the money on development, not marketing
5) Release the code as open source
6) Go under
7) Leave the world a better place on the VC dime.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
It's easy to try and draw parallels between the business models of Eazel and Ximian at first glance. Both were attempting to build free software projects that they could then bundle pay-to-play services into.
:)
The difference, though, is the application they are building and the types of services they are going to be selling. Eazel decided to bundle services into the file manager... this means things like package management, and online storage. Anyone who pays attention to most of the massive free storage systems knows that they are not making a ton of cash... most of what they do make is ad revenue. Storage is cheap; online storage is neat, but not *that* neat. Package management? Great for systems that don't have good package management already, but most linux distro's (and even the BSD's) have this pretty well covered as well.
Ximian, though, took the PIM application. What kind of things do you bundle with a PIM app? Calenders, Shared whiteboards, Task management, Mail. How many large corporate enterprises who don't have these services? If you were shopping around for an Exchange clone (because we all know how great exchange is) and someone pointed you to this great application with a flexible front end, a shared calender and all the other services you would be missing? Goldmine. Let end users pay a small amount to use the services; it proves the scalability. Corporations purchase the whole package, outsourcing the infrastructure to Ximian. Take Microsoft's revenues from Exchange *alone* and you could have a pretty successfull company.
The business model is sound. Eazel's flaw, IMHO, was the application and services they choose to target. Ximian, on the other hand, looks to me like a sound prospect.
Granted, this is all supposition... I don't work for Eazel or Ximian, nor do I know any of the principals. Sure makes sense to me, though.
-- http://sysadminsith.org/software/last
It was Nautilus' webcentricity that made it great, I hope somehow it can continue in some form or other. The project was brilliant.
come off crisp and play up to the cynic
clean and schooled right down to the minute
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
What part of Public don't you understand?
The code is still copyrighted and still owned by the copyright owner, who is free to relicense the code however they wish (even to close the source... . but this doesn't retroactively affect code released previously under the GPL, which still stays free). The fact that they put the code under the GPL simply gives you the ability to use it under the GPL's terms, but doesn't give you ownership of the code.
And it's the GNU General Public License, not the GNU Public License.
--
Ximian packaged Nautilus has the spinner replaced with a glowing blue radar-gem.
;)
Now the services are dead, there is no eazel branding in gnome at all.
Also; since there is no longer a branding motivation the name of nautilus (at least in the desktop) can be changed to something more appropriate. Making the confusing cognitive leap from a deep-sea crustacean to file management serves no longer purpose.
Even the Mac's "chooser" makes more sense
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
Evolution is compatible with exchange if Exchange is using LDAP and IMAP. If it's using the Microsoft protocols then it's not.
So you think Eazel was just a big scam? You think those engineers said "hey lets waste a year of our lives on a project that's doomed to fail"? They tried to provide a service in an area where Gnome was seriously lacking. Any investor who lost money on this has no one to blame but themselves. Any investment is a risk especially in a linux company.
As far as future investment I don't see IBM pulling out of the market. I think it was a stupid premise to make money on in the first place. If anything it shows potential linux startups that they need to provide solid mainstream apps, not niche products.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You really can't blame Eazel for what happened. They made a good faith effort to provide an advanced filemanager/brower/whatever for Gnome. Unfortunatly the linux desktop market being 2% or whatever it is now , cannot support such a company in a profitable way. Eazel did not force their filemanager on Gnome, Gnome asked for it willingly. If anyone is to blame its the project leaders at Gnome who full knowing this could happen went ahead and put all their eggs in one basket. The positive aspect to this is its GPL'd and development will continue. I know this is little comfort to many, but this is opensource Darwinism in action, and things like this happen. Maybe the Gnome group will learn from this and become better for it. "You don't make friends with salad" ac no more
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I think free-speech source is really cool, but folks have to put their wallets where their hearts are.
Best wishes to Eazel employees and execs, I'm sad to see you close shop.
They are listening.
And to think I just started using nautilus last week when I installed the new Mandrake 8.0 with all the neat new Gnome stuff. Seems like everytime I find something cool something messed up happens. I guess next to go will be the evolution Outlook replacement.
No todo lo que es oro brilla
Maybe IBM could use some of their $1B Linux money to back Eazel development.
The sad thing is that the CIO crowd will actually read this and think, maybe just a little, "yeah...".
- BSD
- PostGres
- Mosaic
- Sendmail
- The UW-Imap Server (this one I'm not sure about the funding on, just the source)
- Cyrus tools (again, not sure on the direct funding)
- WU-FTPD (again, not sure on direct funding)
- Pine (another one like UW-Imap)
- the NCSA Web Server (which transmogrified into Apache over time)
All came from government-sponsored university research projects. Even where the link between a funding grant and a project isn't direct, so much university research is government funded that it's difficult to separate out those projects which are university produced, but not the direct result of a government grant.If he did that it would DEFINITELY end up as a legal conundrum. A company with shareholders and a board cannot simply have an executive donate ANYTHING of that much value on a whim. The creditors would sue Andy personally before he finished assigning the copyright, and the FSF claiming that he had no right to assign the copyright like that. And they'd probably win. You can't do stuff like that when you're going into liquidation.
"Being Liberal should be a Crime!"
In most of the west being liberal can get you killed. Putting a liberal bumper sticker on your car is an invitation to get your headlights smashed or your car riddles with bullet holes. Not only is being liberal a crime it is punishable by death without a judge or jury. I know because it's happened to people I know.
I know better then to advertise my beliefs.
War is necrophilia.
California an exception notice I said most of the west. Once you leave california (or possibly washington) things get ugly for liberals (and also minorities and gays BTW).
There are islands of sanity clustered around collage towns (boise versus the rest of idaho for example).
Most of the west is rural and is populated by people who don't like other people too much. They moved there to get away from other people and would never want to live in a city where they would have to interact frequently with other people. Whereever there are large populations of people living together it's liberal wherever people want to distance themselves from their neighbors it's conservative. That point is so obvious from the election map of counties that voted for Bush and Gore. Even though Gore got the majority of votes the map shows mostly (geographically) Bush. About half the country is liberal and lives in cities the other half is conservative and lives in sparsely populated areas.
It's easy to express your beliefs in an anonymous setting like slashdot. In fact for me it's the only safe way to do so. If I was to say these things in the real world I live in there would be a cross burning on my lawn in no time.
War is necrophilia.
And I would bet my money that St. Louis, Branson, and Kansas city usually vote democratic while the rest of missouri votes republican.
BTW P.J is an elitist asshole. I once saw him on letterman and most of his jokes were about how poor people are stupid and have no manners. He was making fun of people who go to red lobster and comparing them to people who go to the tavern on the green as if your average poor person could even dream of stepping foot in the tavern on the green.
War is necrophilia.
"Now, my best advice I can pass on to you is dont piss people off who have guns. They will shoot at you. Plain and simple."
Well that's exactly what I said. People will shoot you if you piss them off. Usually if you have bumper sticker that says "save the salmon" it pisses off people in oregon who WILL SHOOT YOU!. The penalty for being a liberal is death without a judge, jury or a trial.
Yes I've been to Eugene and it's liberal (it's a collage town after all) but I have also been to medford and klamath falls and roseburg too. As I have said before most people who live in cities are liberal people who live out in the boonies are conservative.
War is necrophilia.
The middle class is an illusion. There are three classes in the US. The destitute who don't have jobs, the people who have to work, and the people who don't ever have to work if they want to.
PJ is the top 5% tier which does not have to work. For him it's amusement to make fun of the poor slobs who have to go to work every day and fend for themselves. Kind of like when people go to the dump to shoot rats.
War is necrophilia.
"Damn, just reading your slashdot posts I want to load my rifle up and give a good "Yeehaw" -- not because your viewpoints, because of your blatant I'm"
Thanks for making my point. You want to murder me not because I hurt you or your familiy, not because I dragged a black man behind my pickup truck, not because I blew up a federal building, not because I killed a doctor but because I had the nerve to speak my mind and voice my opinion. You did not like what you heard and I did not pass some attitude test. No judge, no jury just cold blooded murder for thinking different then you and daring to speak.
I have not done a study of the murders in oregon but I'd venture to say that percentage wise it's probably about the same as new york. Mostly though the bumper sticker is likely to get you assaulted or vandalized more then anything else. I guess that's restraint for you.
On a side note. Yea Ashland is a fairly liberal because it's a collage town just like eugene. Medford is far from liberal as a simple perusing fo the OP-ED and the letters to the editor will make clear. Its been a while since I was in Medford so I don't know what the name of the mall is but if it's that place where the movie theater and the 24 hour gym is I think it's something plaza. Not much of a mall either for what it's worth not that I spend much time in malls anyway. When I was there I had to go to ashland to eat just about every day because nobody could think of a decent restaurant in medford. The I had crappy service in one deli and crappy food in the place witht he big fish on the wall just as you get off the highway.
War is necrophilia.
"How would you feel about me if I told you your mother was a crack-smoking whore?"
I hope to hell oregon is not your mother. You can talk all the shit about where I'm from It don;t bother me none. It's just another country.
"I have a right to want to bitch slap the living shit out you because you are a loud, annoying, clueless, fuck."
Check again. In the united states you do not have the right to bitch slap the living shit out of anybody. Maybe in your redneck town this is accepted practise but as a general rule anywhere where the judges and the cops are not rednecks this is called assault. One again you do not have the right to kill, you do not have the right to destroy property, you do not have the right to physically assault people just because they say things that annoy you. These kinds of things generally happen in small towns where everybody thinks the same. Kill a hippie in Klamath falls and the cops will probably help you bury the tree hugging, commie, pinko fag. Kill a hippie in portland and it's murder.
I am going to say it again in case you still don't get it. You do not have the right to kill, hit, slap or therwise assault anybody. You also do not have the right to destroy other peoples property. No matter what they say, what they look like, what they smell like, what's on their bumper sticker, what they eat, what they drink, who they vote for, or where they are from. Got it?
War is necrophilia.
"The problem with retards like you is you dont understand the real reason as to why you get the shit beat out of you. "
First of all after a few years of studying Gracie Juie Jitsu I don't ever get the shit beat out of me. Being around rednecks like you makes self defense a priority. There is nothing more satisfying then putting a hillbilly in a chokehold in under 45 seconds and watching the expression on his face as the person he expected to wipe to floor with starts to cut off his air supply. It's priceless. Of course being a believer in on-violence I don't actually kill the bastard of even make him pass out. It's enough to scare him enough so that the next time he wants to kick some ass he'll think twice.
Of course a chokehold is no good if the redneck is packing (most of them do these days) and is looking to actually commit murder today (most of them will not actually do it even if they really want to).
Anyways I have toured oregon and there is nothing to see there. Cetainly I would never suggest that any liberal actually spend his dollars in a state that hates homosexuals, hates environmentalists, hates liberals enough to WANT TO kick the shit out of them. If you are a liberal it makes no sense to spend your money where people hate you. Go spend your money where people like you and welcome you.
War is necrophilia.
Oh I see I can't perform a proper choke hold because of a typing error. I get it now. It must be some sort of a hillbilly logic going on here.
If oregonians want to bet up liars then they must spend all day beating up people because every body lies every day. Ever go a day without lying? How about to yourself?
If oregonians didn't hate homosexuals they wouldn't be passing legislation denying them basic human rights like right to marry. Oregonians are hateful people no doubt about it.
War is necrophilia.
Well, Nautilus is in gnome-cvs. :)
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Yeah, California's neither Liberal, nor in the west. :P
You advertise your beliefs pretty well, BTW.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
didn't even come out with a final product that's useful.
:P
I like it. It's great for use with my digital camera, scanner, and mp3 collection.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I guess it's time to ebay my eazel bags I got at LinuxWorld.
Poor Eazel....
General Public License.
That and the GPL is owned by the Free Software Foundation, note the little Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc In the document.
That's what I meant.
What about the rest of us who already _pay_ for something like Explorer??? Why should we tax the already overburdened taxpayer even more for a product he/she possibly does not want to use?
This is completely harebrained and not rational thinking.
Could not have planed it better.Make a company and get a bunch of outside investors to pay for software development, shut down, lose the investors, continue development with volunteers. Reform new company 3 years later. The only loss is employees and investors.
Get a free ipod.
Hell, at the command line I can say look in directory A and directory B which both have the same set of files and copy any files that are different from directory B to directory A. This process is relatively easy to express. You might be able to automate this particular process in a file manager, but unless you can implement a process by which I can easily express similar file manipulations, I'm really not interested.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The modified BSD license is considered a free license by GNU standards too. Just because it doesn't mimic the GPL exactly doesn't mean it's not free. Next time you post a link to somewhere, be sure you've read what it's talking about.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Expect to hear the same announcement from Ximian in a few months. Any company that depends on ongoing funding to survive, is fundamentally broken.
I would think there is a serious future in packaging GNOME for Mandrake, RedHat, Sun, IBM, HP, and others. Most of them would be happy to have someone compile and test GNOME for their platform.
In the same light, RedHat will derive substantial income from packaging linux for Dell, Compaq, and others. It is not anything close to the revenue platform of Windows, but the game is changing. Packaging is support, and many companies would be happy to outsource such a task.
If we were all to read posts that congratulate eachother on how amazing they are, and if all responses to articles would point out how much they like Linux and how it's the best thing since sliced bread, we'd wouldn't be having much of a discussion. Instead, we'd have a mutual admiration society.
It's really not so outlandish. That's the whole thing -- free software lets you do that if you like. Not only that, we'll probably _have_ to strip out the Eazel logo, given that the Eazel mark will likely be passed on to another unrelated company that would have to give permission for the use of that logo.
Nautilus is "owned" by it's copyright holders and it's licensed under the GPL when it is distributed. So even if the copyright owner were to be Eazel, and that copyright were to be assigned to another entity in the process of paying off creditors, the existing code would still be free -- just not free to be relicensed without the copyright holder's approval.
Actually, even licenses that include an advertising clause are Free Software. They just aren't GPL compatible. Note that the old-style BSD license is listed on this page.
Jeremy
--
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
... These guys are unemployed now. The last thing they want to hear is how much you hated their product.
:-)
And jeez, was it really that bad? I felt that Nautilus showed great potential. Maybe the releases leading up to 1.0 weren't so hot, but I felt as if Eazel had been making strides. And I feel that we'll have quite a nice desktop environment by the time we get to Gnome 3.0.
Anyway, try to be nice... Some "community."
a quick look at fuckedcompany.com shows that they are not fucked yet. as a matter of fact there are only fucks for Eazel. The last one dated May 12th.
Anyway it's sad to see Eazel go, I've been saying for quite a while that linux and the like would never get a good thoughtout consistant user interface without traditional software development.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Wouldn't a web interface ( with add-on infrastructure like Zope) be a better choice?
Also, I never understood the idea 'if they like Nautilus they will come to us for services'. Supposing they were successful, they would have to face:
This sort of thing only works for closed-source software -- until the protocol is reverse-engineered that is; after it is just lawsuit nightmare ( and lawyers paradise ).
Ciao
----
FB
Sticking to the point, my reson for being puzzled at Eazel idea is that, being Nautilus open-source, someone else can easily offer the same service (unless they planned to patent the protocol).
Then, the advantage of Eazel would have been only that Nautilus would come pre-configured with their web address (or whatever). And Sun/HP/etc could still struck deals with Eazel competitors and change this, too.
Ciao
----
FB
A filemanager for Unix would need to do much better than copying explorer and put pretty icons in it. You have to compete with the standard toolbox (cp, mv, rm etc.). No matter how nice it is users tend choose the best tool for the job. And cp in a good shell (like bash) is a fair bit faster than clicking around in a window for your directorys. I think we should look at Directory Opus for Amiga, one of the most rewarded Amiga proggies of all time and one of the longest survivors in a small market. Opus is not a replacement for the shell (which was also quite good). It is also totaly customizable and easy to use. You can be a experienced unix user without knowing the flags for building a tar package. This is a good example where a filemanager can be a good replacement for the shell. watching images and playing mp3 is not very usefull when you know how to start gqview and xmms.
Their biggest mistake was jumping the gun in calling themselves a business. If they wanted to succeed, it would've been better to develop it as a side project until it was almost usable, and then to announce the formation of such a company when all the pieces were in place.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
The original clause is:
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
The rational behind not using licenses that include this clause is quite sound, you can see some arguments for omiting that clause at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html (don't worry, it doesn't say the BSD license sucks and everyone should use GPL). You could imagine how such a clause could cause problems if, perhaps, you had a product that included 40-50 of programs with those kinds of licenses -- the required statements could outnumber actual ad-space.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
And where is the Exchange clone for linux? Yup, there is none. I wonder if m$ would kill any company who even tried...
The Exchange clone is Here. (that's http://www.ximian.com/apps/evolution.php3 for the worried-about-bad-links folk). Evolution is already a pretty comprehensive package - if they manage to get it to interact successfully with centralized Groupware servers, such as Lotus Notes Domino, they stand an extremely good chance of taking Gnome deep into the corporate desktop, not just scratching the surface.
There is a similar project underway for KDE 2 - I'm sure we'll get the goods on that from someone else.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Thanks for the correction. I get confused by the recursive TLA's so prevalent in Free Software projects...
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
What part of Public don't you understand?
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Perhaps I just need to shut up and get back to work...
--
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Free Software Foundation exactly the type of organization we're talking about? They're non-profit, specialized in taking care of donated code, and they actively encourage people to transfer the copyright of their GPL'd projects to the FSF.
In Texas the voter turnout was less than 50%, so figure half of these people you think hate you could care less what your political views are. Of the other half maybe 60% voted republican in 2000. Which means 70% of the population either agrees with you or is agnostic to your views.
Also most Texans respect someone who can give a reasonable argument for their beliefs. They may not agree with you, but they will listen. They way you talk you seem as close-minded as the people you are complaining about
You act like I can't find some close-minded community anywhere in the country. I guarantee if I look I can find quite a few in any state. When I lived in CA I found quite a few places that were farther to the right than anything I've ever seen in Texas.
BTW It will be wasting your time to not vote straight Republican in Texas when the entire legislature is Republican controlled. Don't forget that Texas was almost exclusively a Democrat state not that long ago. I will admit they probably weren't as liberal as the Democrats to the north, but they were more liberal than the Republicans.
wedit used to be GPL. Then, all of the sudden, the authors just took the source code out of the site, without warning anybody. And now, I'm stuck with the desire of using the GPL'd versions, but all there's left in the site are binaries, and, apparently, nobody bothered to mirror it. :-(
Oh yeah its not 'free' by GNU standards, but when my code is released under the BSD license ANYONE can use it for ANYTHING they feel like. Now to me that sounds like freedom. BTW your post is an obvious troll.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What's a yurt? Was that a misspelling, or something real?
Yes, the sourced is open, but if Eazel still owns the code, they could very well do this. They have "property", the property definetly has some "value", and the property, namely the code ownership can be given to a non-profit. In fact, the natural home for this project, the GNU foundation, already exists.
Why would a VC bother? it's all about the Benjamins. See, companies buy other companies for tax losses all the time. Compag paid for about a 1/3 of the DEC acquisition just from DEC deferred tax losses. NO, the VCs won't get their full $13 million back, but with a few hundred thousand dolars spent on lawyers and accountants they could probably make back a few million. Not a bad ROI!
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Mr. AC, you have said very succinctly what I had been thinking for a while. Is there any reason to criticize a small group of hackers for managing to blow through $13 million of someone else's money in a year while doing what they enjoy? Hell, no. I admire them. I would like to get a group of my friends together, start a company, and do the same.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Sorry but I'm not so happy seeing so many Linux companies going down, are you ? When you think to work world it does matter also to be able to work with Linux , not only to write good software.
Yes, but those are free services. They didn't have the ones that would cost money available yet. In fact, they only recently started to develop a framework for that (reef).
Monkey sense
Nice try at thinking but check MS's financials and you'll find relatively they don't make much money from support.
Try rewording it as "If you had a monopoly and made lots of money on incompatible upgrades, would you stop developing your product?"
Or were you talking about Oracle?
Why, I'm afraid I can't begin to understand what it is you are talking about. My sig is referring to the manufacturer of Kleenex.
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Nautilus is extremely easy to use. It does not set the usability of Gnome back a couple years. It just seems that Nautilus suffered the same fate in its 1.0 release that Gnome 1.0 did: It was released many months to soon. Gnome 1.0.50 worked great, but Gnome 1.0 was less stable than 0.9x. Nautilus was pushed out the door. (It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why). Nautilus will be just fine, and so will Gnome.
You probably think I'm full of shit, so I guess we'll just have to wait six months and see who is right.
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Anybody remember the hype that "Java was dead?" Well, here we go again...
My predictions:
Dvorak will declare Gnome dead, saying KDE has won.
Having been overcome by the excitement, Fred Moody will have a fatal seizure while trying to write a similar story.
ZDNet will run future KDE vs. Gnome reviews, and give KDE the thumbs up based on Gnome's "no longer maintained" file manager.
In the meantime, both the Gnome and KDE camps will continue building great desktop environments. Nautilus will lose its services, get cleaned up, stabilize and offer dramatic performance improvements such that it is everyday usable.
Well that's all of my rant, best be getting back to that highly lucrative Java programming now.
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Most businesses fail. That was true before 2000 and that will be true after 2001. Eazel, like so many high-profile dot-bombs, burned its VC like birch. Eazel is not evidence. It's a statistic.
Currently, I'd say Red Hat is the best example of a successful free-software business. It sells a brand and support, and it's going to be profitable Real Soon Now. That said, I'm not sure Red Hat is the best prototype for commercial free software.
Take, for example, a specialized database system, like school records. A university pays big money to a clumsy Oracle VAR for a poorly designed school records system. Multiply that by ten or a hundred schools (each with an IT department and a CS school), remove the Oracle VAR (and maybe the Oracle) and you have a free software project with paid developers.
This statement is kind of contradictory. If it's great to have Linux replace Windows, how will it happen if the intention isn't there to make this a reality? Of course Linux wasn't intended to replace Windows, it was a hack by a guy who just wanted to use the same kind of computer at home that he used at school. By that criteria, the whole project was finished long ago and he could've moved on to something else. But the goal and intentions for Linux have shifted since it's beginnings, and will continue to. Of course we need to accomodate new users--the more the merrier. And they don't need to be comp-sci students either. We have a great thing going and to horde it all to ourselves isn't the right or intelligent thing to do. My mother doesn't need to know how her car engine works in order to drive it, nor would I expect her to. I just want her to have a way to get to my grandmother's house without any hassles so she can help out with things around the house. I want the same for my brother, who not only needs the car to do stuff, but may be curious about some of the stuff under the hood and more interested in learning about the details. He can do that as well. If I had designed the car and was the only one who knew how to operate it, I would make my next goal to fix the design in such a way that others could use it without having to know everything.
Of course your friend was unimpressed with Nautilus. It looks the way it does because so many Linux users insist that they don't want or need a good UI and are happy when a company that was trying to develop one went out of business. Nautilus isn't ready for prime time--it's got a ways to go. Eazel was a company that needed long term investors, not short term ones. The software is still in development and I'm sure the pace will reduce now that the developers aren't getting paid to work on it full-time, but hopefully it'll still achieve it's goals. It's sad that is the way it has to be, but that's the reality of the situation.
Eazel was formed to try to take something that was good, but complicated, (Linux) and add another part that made it easier for people who didn't want to deal with complications. What's so bad about that? I don't mind building software from source, but my wife does. She has neither the training nor the patience to do it, but that doesn't mean that I want her to use something inferior to do her work. I want to use what I know to help her, and if that means adding another layer to make it easier for her, I'm going to do it.
Why use pancake mix when I could use flour, eggs, and yeast to get the same result? Why buy a car with automatic transmission when I could buy one with a manual transmission? Should I have to know how to fly a plane just to get from Texas to Greece? Do you see my point?
I just think that if we have something good (like Linux and open source development), it's good to share it with others because it will benefit us in the long run (more applications, more jobs, more competition, more of everything). That's all.
To all of the Eazel folks who were affected, my sympathies and a hearty thanks to those (especially Eli Goldberg) who were always there to answer my questions and provide troubleshooting suggestions. I'm happy to hear that most of the major project leaders are going to continue working on Nautilus and look forward to what the future may bring. Maybe in another time and climate, things would have worked out differently. As the story submission says, it _has_ been a fun ride. ---tomg
You also never used anything you speak of or understand what macs are good at or even what quark is. Sure Mac's are simple machines but they get the job done nicely and with type 1 fonts which M$ never cared to adopt. and yes KOffice, openoffice, Staroffice can all read MS office file formats. For the Love of Lucifuge/Satan/<your deity>, please before complaining read up on what you are talking about.
... Now, will somebody make a version of this that actually installs on Slackware? :)
--
its not compulsory, but it is recommended.
Doubly recommended when in the process of going belly-up.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
In the eyes of future investors, (especially the recent promises by former Eazel employees to continue work on Nautilus despite the company closing) this company rose from the Open Source Movement, developed a tool using their money , then dissolved back into the movement, taking the product of their investment with them. In the eyes of the media and the investors,
I think that you are the only one who sees it this way, maybe because you're being paranoid. I think most investors will see this no differently than any one of the other million or so companies that failed for whatever reason.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Do you mean nautilus 0.9? If so, man, you really need to upgrade. If you're impressed by that, you'll love 1.0.3. Its the only version I've liked so far, and I really like it.
There are several things wrong with your evaluation here.
1. Gore did not get the majority of the popular vote. Both he and Bush got about 49%. The difference between them was a smaller percentage nationally than the narrow difference in the official Florida count, and reports of voter fraud by Democrats in places like Wisconson were, to say the least, alarming. At best, Gore took an extremely narrow plurality (the largest minority) of the popular vote.
2. Bush did not win in rural areas. The electoral map creates that illusion, because Bush carried a lot of states known for wide rural country. However, if you break it down by counties or districts, you see a radically different story. Gore walked away with both the most crowded of urban centers and the most sparse of hillbilly country. Bush's votes came almost entirely from the suburbs, where he dominated. As P.J. O'Rourke put it, Bush won every sqare inch of America that had indoor plumming but was not covered in graffiti. (This should come as no surprise... the rural and urban citizens are the ones who depend the most on government services while being in the lower tax brackets; the suburbanites tend to pay more taxes, and consider the government to be more of a burden than a provider. Gore ran on protecting services, Bush ran on cutting taxes, and every damned one of us voted for whichever man who would fill our wallets the most.)
One last point... in the "rural" states you mention, the vast majority of the population base lives in, or near, a city. Just because Missouri has a lot of open country doesn't mean it is made up entirely of hicks. Most of of them live in and around the cities of St. Louis, Branson, and Kansas City. They have orchestras, major league sports, theater districts, office towers... pretty much everything that you think makes East Coast life so much "better", except on a smaller scale, and with fewer murders.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Oh, BTW, poor folks don't eat a Red Lobster either. He was making fun of the middle class, not the poor.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Oh yea... and do you honestly consider f*ing Branson, Missouri to be a hotbed of liberal thought!? You have obviously never been there! We are talking about folks who may very well be the most square people on the face of the Earth, and they are actually proud of it. Hell, they market all their tourism to people based on wow Gosh-Darn-Diddly Wholesome they are. They are so conservative, they make Mormons want to puke.
St. Louis, maybe, especially in the urban core... but Branson!?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
So does this mean Nautilus will be dropped by RedHat and Mandrake? Mandrake already includes just about every worthwhile window manager out there so I don't think they will drop it just yet... but if they do then it is certain death for Nautilus since no one will bother installing a dead-end technology themselves.
Always encrypt with rot13 TWICE for extra security.
Eazel's problem was that they were underfunded. It's too soon to tell if their business model would have worked.
But, regardless of it all, we still have Nautilus, right?? Ok, back to the merits of the program for just a minute: It sucks. It single-handedly sets GNOME back a couple years as far as useability goes. But what the community sees in it doesn't matter, look at what future would-be investors in free software see! They see a company that robbed its investors and gives the product of their investments away completely. If this was a closed source project owned by Eazel at least the investors would get that, but nope, they get nothing, and don't think that future investors won't remember Eazel when thinking about other open source companies...
Yeah, and would-be investors are going to remember this for a long time.
Yeah, and bad for future open-source companies looking for funding...
Nautilus is no easier to use than most of the other "big" file managers for X desktops (konqueror, gmc, the old kde file manager, gentoo, etc). As far as I can tell the only real advancement over them is the extensive (yet useless!) previewing capabilities and the MacOS Xesque look. But it is in not an improvement over the old GNOME file manager. The stability is terrible and the "features" are useless for real world work. It chokes on large directories and randomly crashes on small ones. The interface is showy at the expense of both speed and desktop real-estate. Fullscreen icons are great to look at and seem cool for the first 15 minutes, but after that they just get in the way. I don't think you're full of shit, I have no doubts that in 6 months the stability will be there, but that doesn't change the fundamental problem of giving up efficency (both speed and screen-space) for WORK for a few showy features. Nautilus, much like the company who made it, can get your attention but can't deliver what it should have been focusing on.
I have this problem with all my GUIs.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
It seems to be the cause of everyone's woes.
While this is not a rant aimed specifically at Eazel, how many companies are based on a nifty concept that wont even begin to earn revenue (not profits) for quite a while? Who's supposed to sponsor these companies' operations?
Unless you have extremely deep pockets, you had better be capable of being able to earn at least a significant part of your costs back ASAP, and demonstrate how that will scale to profits within a few years. Fundamental business.
I have no sympathy for anyone, and simply disgust for the VCs.
You personally know people who have been killed in a western state because they put a liberal bumper sticker on their car? If so, you have my sympathies. However, I think that rural areas shouldn't be judged by anecdotes alone. Rural violent crime rates are 4 times lower than those of urban areas. See the paragraph just above Table 2 at http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/dr ugfree/v1donner.htm. While I'm sure "out and proud" liberals are sometimes harassed, I think that on the whole, they're safer in rural areas than in the cities.
I also think a lot depends on where you live, just as it does in a large city. Sandpoint, Idaho, for example, used to have a large Aryan Nations compound. For a time, it probably wasn't the most safe area for an outspoken liberal to live.
However, in my experience, most rural residents have a "live and let live" attitude, and tolerate a far wider range of behaviors than city dwellers will allow. For example, try setting up a yurt on your land in SF, or converting your front lawn into a garden in LA.
I strongly suspect SF's strict zoning laws would make setting up a yurt illegal.
On the face of it, OSS projects should be able to survive the transition of management from the project initiator to another group of interested developers, but it's not that simple. OSS projects are more than the source code. There is a great deal of infastructure required in order to manage decentralized development efforts. Thanks to SourceForge for providing a great deal of that infastructure. The other componant needed in an OSS project is a leader, weather that is one person or a group of people. This leader is the visionary and driving force behind the project and unless projects can find new leaders for developers to gravitate around, the project will unboubtedly slide into mediocrity and disrepair.
Much luck to the projects left stranded by the demise of Easel. It appears that the project leaders are taking steps to find the ptojects new homes, with varying degrees of success.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Well, I probably should comment on this since I have had to study a bit about nonprofits.
For tangible items, the amount deductible is above the FMV or Fair Market Value. If you sell a mug or t-shirt as a nonprofit and mark it up 50%, then that 50% of "profit" you made is tax-deductible by the person. It's considered a donation.
Since free software has no fair market value, there is no way to value it. Legally, it's probably "valueless". Valueless things can be donated but where the line is with free software in terms of deduction, I'm not sure.
Now, again, I'm not an expert on the topic.. but it would be suicidal to screw with the IRS and just say, "Well, this cost $10M to produce and I'm deducting it". That's a great way to screw yourself and everyone associated with you.
Assuming that an NPO (nonprofit organization) was formed (or an existing one) and did take it over, every NPO is on a very [very] tight budget with limited resources, so whatever happens with Nautilus will be very limited and amateurish compared to the grandiose scale of what was being proposed.
IMHO, it is probably a positive thing that commercial influence was drained from Nautilus so it can be taken seriously by the community. There was some skepticism in replacing GMC with a commercially-backed product, though as I've said before I really think Eazel are good guys in a bad predicament.
Lucas
--
The Spindl3top Foundation, Inc. - Cambridge, MA
I guess you didn't get it. I didn't say they were doing nothing. In fact. I like Nautilus a lot, and I use Gnome 1.4.
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They said: "we're gonna get money from services!". But they forgot to make such services AVAILABLE, that's the whole point. It wasn't Nautilus the profit source, but its services .
Please, try to understand what people say before being so rude.
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You think Bill Gates is evil?
Nautilus not not vapourware. It's very good, indeed (I like it).
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All I said was that Eazel had to give people services. That was supposed to be their profit source, and you can't just release a software and get money from something that doesn't exist.
If you say your profit source is XXX, you'll need XXX or else you'll be f***ed up.
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You think Bill Gates is evil?
Ok, I know they had services. But I'm talking about PAID services! Online storage and software upgrade weren't paid. So, where could they get some money from? PLEASE, think about it, don't just say "you're a retard".
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Let me give you and example. Let's suppose Nokia gives away their cell phones, saying they will generate profit from paid services. It's okay, the cell phones are really cool, there are already free services for it, but not a single paid service. How would they get money from? The same thing happened to Eazel.
Got it? Try to understand what people mean before saying "You're retard", "So's your momma".
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You think Bill Gates is evil?
My question is: DID THEY GENERATE PROFIT FROM SUCH SERVICES?
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I know they had services available, but not a single paid service. So, they said that was going to be their profit source, . AFAIK, you can get money from services, but not from free services. So, having services doesn't mean Eazel was going to be profitable. It's like Nokia giving away their cell phones, start charging for services, but without offering a paid service at all. It's so obvious that even you, my dear genius, should've noticed.
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You think Bill Gates is evil?
Aaaaaah now I got it. I have to say everything so no one gets me wrong. Please, stop it. You're not being very clever. It's IMPOSSIBLE to do that. There will always be someone saying "You're a retard", "Fuck you", and clueless replies.
:)
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Have you read what I said in my original post? It's so easy to understand even my dog could read it. Too bad many people simply don't get it.
Try to post something about a Linux company shutting down, or something not positive about Linux, without being misunderstood. I dare you
BTW, being immature is not posting a message in Slashdot, but trying to judge someone because a single message. That's extremely stupid, I never do that, I just reply messages.
--------------------------------------
You think Bill Gates is evil?
is that they wanted to start earning money from services, but we didn't see any services at all. How can you say you're going to get money from something yet to be made?- -----
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You think Bill Gates is evil?
Huh. This is so off-topic and provocative that I will be nice to you.
Firstly, if you want to ask a question, and there is no relevant story at the time, go to the "Submit Story" link that you can probably see in the top-left corner below the Slashdot title. Choose "Ask Slashdot" in the Topic and Section drop down menu.
Now in response to the question, my answer would be to do a lot more research. Many of the best firewall systems are in fact free. Open source firewall's generally means more peice of mind. Linux and BSD are both great for running firewall's. An example of a free Linux distribution made specifically for firewall's is Astaro Security Linux. There are many other Linux distributions usable as firewall's. These will generally give you more security than any Windows based firewall, at a much lower total cost of ownership.
Apologies to the Slashdot community for this reply to an off-topic post.
I have no experience and I am just bullshitting. ;-)
Your wrong, I should have backed up my statements. At least she was nice enough to reply in a way that wouldn't be mod'd down to flaimbait. (Though her assumptions about me were inaccurate.)
You paint venture capitalist as people we should not care about. I disagree! Venture capitalist allow for people with good ideas to get a shot at making dreams come true. Venture capitalists take big risks and hope for big rewards in their investments. I pity all the money the VC's put into the dotcom bussinesses because all that capital was flushed down the toilet by the dotcomers instead of going to more viable investments that would have produced real revenue and opportunities for others!
I miss the Karma Whores.
Just because the code runs on BSD does not mean that it's BSD licensed. As a matter of fact, most *BSD's come with the GNU utilities, and a new BSD has started with the aim of removing all GPL software from their distribution.
Open Source tax breaks has come up at least once before as an Ask Slashdot (which means that it's probably come up more than once...). This one from April 15 is the most recent discussion. Consensus: You might be able to claim it, but be prepared to spend huge amounts in audits.
Now, what happens to the BeOS when Be Inc. folds in a few months? More likely than not it will cease to grow and adapt, the source shared only to a few engineers at Sony trying to make AOL run on it.
- Dan I.
There are significant differences between Ximian and Eazel. Eazel's staff was mostly high paid execs and business development staff; oh yeah, and some programmers. Ximian grew its roots as a lean programming house. Now Ximian has real products coming to market (and hopefully real revenue potential), and Eazel has... Very different companies.
Hunger is the best sauce.
Everytime the kde vs gnome war thing starts up, I just take alook at my simple yet wonderful Blackbox gui, and breath a sigh of relief.
:)
It is sad to see any linux product go, despite whether I use it or not. The bigger the user base, the better for everyone involved with linux. Choice is better than flame wars
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
...big businesses, the government, charitable organizations and philanthropists. After all, is not art sponsored by the government and other organizations? Maybe Eazel should have applied for a grant, one never knows.
Maybe we should actively pressure our representatives to sponsor free software because it's for the greater public good. Just one man's opinion. I hope the McArthur Foundation and others are listening.
Wroot
The IBM money will run out. How much can they be making off selling out of date CD's?
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
You must be kidding, right? The VCs has pumped in enormous amount of money into this.
Don't you at least think they have the right to do whatever they want with it, for what's its worth?
While that is certainly interesting as well, I would think a situation where the copyright was transferred to a non-profit as a charitable gift might be a clearer case. Anyone know?
An organization that specialized in such a thing might be able to provide industry analysts and consultants that could help value the properties and provide third-party testimony during audits.
It was who I was thinking of. I avoided the name because I didn't want to pull any "I hate richard stallamn" posts. Because you could easily have more than one of these... personalities wouldn't be the issue.
So because all of the development expenses are business expenses to start, there is no further means of tax relief? What happens in a situation where a company makes a product for profit and then donates some of those products to charity? Is there no tax advantage in that case?
If a company were to donate their source code to a non-profit organization that acted as kind of a clearing house for open source projects, is it possible that some or part of the development costs could be written off once the result was donated to the non-profit?
While Eazel might not be the best example of the power this could have, as it has already provided the code open sourced and likely doesn't have much tax liability at all... Imagine a closed source project that never sees the light of day and ends up in a bit warehouse somewhere. I am the investors in many of these failed tech companies wouldn't think twice about assigning the IP rights to get something back after everything blew up.
you might want to check www.eavel.com and download gnome.mp3
it's... bitter than the official site.
A predictable problem, given that they were trying to do much of it in C/C++. When will people learn that if time to market are a primary concern, they should use languages and tools that reduce time needed for development, debugging, and testing? Use C/C++ for small, focussed, specific, compute-intensive tasks.
Likewise, the reason that the Gnome component model itself is late is because C has so little built-in support for that kind of functionality. Trying to provide that functionality in a library is a lot of extra work both for the library and for the application developers, and it is never as good as if it is just built-in and enforced by the language.
You can have your own guesss how time to market can be reduced. My personal view is that they should at least have written their software in a different language, maybe Java or Python. That would by no means guarantee fast time-to-market or frewer bugs, but it at least removes some obstacles.
Win2k can use type one fonts just fine with no third-party type manager. Just drop them in the fonts folder. Do your research, chief.
You know, as much as all companies hate a recession I betcha M$ is loooving this one. So many open source efforts have closed their doors and you know they're all about that. In fact (for a little bit of conspiracy theory funtime), I wonder if M$ would use their sway in the economy to keep it from recovering for a while to kill off all open source and smaller company competition? Just a little paranoid thought...
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Software can be released under the GPL with the copyright ownership being retained by an individual or corporation. I thought everybody knew that...
In other words, maybe they ripped off the Venture Capitalists, sullied the reputation of Open Source to the VC community, and didn't even come out with a final product that's useful. Hope they paid themselves well in the process....
Yeah! Sock it to 'the man', etc. etc.
"result of a collaborative effort of many people working towards a common good"
...
You have just described half of US corporations which definately DO PAY people to collaborate.
Do they work towards a common good ?
Well, depends how you define common good
Some would even dare to say that once this new BWM comes out and is available for purchase it becomes our "common good "...
The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
Two years ago, a small team came up with an idea, "what is the weak link in a Linux installation? The interface!" "Let's find some famous UI guys and form a company and take over the Linux desktop. As anyone controls the desktop, he will controls the OS..." "Great idea!" One year ago, the team came up with a better idea. "Geez, with this 15 million OPM, what are we going to do?" "How about *doing nothing* ?" "What!?" "Imagine this, one year later, after we buy a few Porches for ourselves, take a few months of vacation in Thailan, doing nothing... Eazel will go bankrupt, not only we have enjoyed our good time, it also give Linux a bad name!" "H a h a h a . . ."
I think these guys deserve a lot more credit for their business plan than they are getting. For almost a year, they succeeded in getting idiot venture capitalists to pump buckets of money into the development of a large, complex free software project with no realistic hope of ever making money. Now that its nearly in a usable state (it is NOT a fun thing to use right now on my 64mb celeron, but it shows lots of promise, and is at the very least better-looking than any other linux file file manager), they have smartly disbanded and turned development over to the gnome community. The only people really hurt by this are the eazel hackers (who doubtless will be able to find other employment) and the idiot venture capitlalists, who 1. deserved what they got, and 2. probably won't be turning up in soup kitchens or homeless shelters any time soon, rich bastards that they are. On the other hand, we, the free-software community, have gained at no cost a nearly complete, commercial quality (in slickness and in bloat) file manager.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Kathleen
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Graphic designer and Mac lover.
Kathleen
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Graphic designer and Mac lover.
Yes.
Free software is a wonderful thing, and it is definitely possible to make money off of it. Companies like Red Hat and IBM are demonstrating this. I encourage that. If you have a business that can survive while developing and releasing free software, that is excellent.
On the other hand, if you have no business plan, free software won't help you. HINT: "make a file manager and give it away" is not a complete business plan. Even if it becomes popular, if you lose money for every copy you give away, even if you lose less money per copy if you give away more copies, you still won't be a viable business.
I have no sympathy for anyone involved. Neither the idiot venture capitalists who sponsored a project with no clue how it would make money, nor the developers, who obviously confused coding sense with business sense.
I've been in business, and you can't always do what you want. Sometimes, you have to put a lot of effort into making a profit, or else you just won't survive. Where are your ideals then? I wish the best of luck to the hackers involved, and I have a lot of hope for Nautilus. But next time you get involved in a business venture, make sure that sound financial advice is one of the first things you get!
Being Liberal should be a Crime!
Anyway, 'copyright holder' was the correct wording ofcourse. So if we pretend for a bit that Eazel is the copyright holder and that copyright would somehow be re-assigned to a random corporate entity, like you say, the existing source would still be GPL.
However, the imaginary company that would get the copyright could re-brand the name 'Nautilus', correct?
I've been using Easel 0.9 under Mandrake 8 for a couple of weeks now. It is a very slick file manager, and I am glad to hear that development will continue. Suggestion: Maybe some FTP archives would be interested in becoming replacements for the "Software Catalog" Regards, Bill
--- http://www.CPUReview.com http://AboutLinux.com