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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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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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!
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
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.
--
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.
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."
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.
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.
--
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.
--
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
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.
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
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?
...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.
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
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.
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.
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
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!