Eazel's Nautilus 1.0 shipped this week and banished any remaining qualms about Linux's viability on the desktop. How good is Nautilus? When I installed a preview release on my home computer six months ago my housemates actually started using the Linux box.
Eazel, meanwhile, cut 40 jobs in the business and marketing teams -- half its staff -- and may not have much future left after it finishes out its contracts to port Nautilus to commercial Unix platforms such as Solaris. With only the engineering staff spared, what hope is there for Eazel to produce a viable service?
"We're still kicking," according to co-founder Andy Hertzfeld. "We're pursuing all possibilities, including aligning ourselves with a bigger company. We're also looking at a scaled down plan which [might more easily] get funding. We're sticking to our mission, which is to make the Linux desktop easy to use for ordinary people. We are pursuing half a dozen opportunities, but we're not talking about them."
How can Nautilus look forward to a rosy future while parent company Eazel gasps for venture capital? Simple: the GPL.
The GPL ensures developers and users alike that the code will have a life of its own, apart from the economic health of any associated commercial vendors.
While it's sad to think of Eazel losing out on the earnings potential of its work, at least workers there know that their efforts will not have gone to waste. (I imagine that's of small consolation to the company's investors, however).
If GPL'ed code is good code, people and companies will use it, maintain it, and improve it, and it will thrive. There's no vendor lock-in. If one company stumbles, others pick up the ball and run with it.
The joke goes, "Linux, where the software is free and the T-shirts cost money," but unlike cohort Ximian (formerly Helix Code), Eazel doesn't even bother to sell CD-ROMs and hats on its Web site. To date, Eazel has come up with exactly zero ways for potential customers to give them money. Along with the software, they give away 25MB of online backup storage to anyone who registers. Is this company just too idealistic, too good to lower itself to capitalism? The company has talked up a lot of interesting service models over the last year -- everything from remote backups to full remote system administration -- but so far none have materialized.
Is Eazel the right company to develop Nautilus to its potential? "Nautilus is going far, with or without us," says Eazel Directory of Product Marketing Tom Goguen. I think he's right, but Eazel needs a major turnaround if it's going to go along for the ride.
