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GNOME GUI

Eazel Tells All 48

Posted by michael from the post-apocalypse dept.
Ur@eus writes: "We have just put up an interview at Linuxpower with some of the people at Eazel. This is the first interview they've done after the release of Nautilus 1.0 and their recent restructuring. So if you want to know more about Eazel and how they plan to move forward I think you will find this interview interesting."
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Eazel Tells All More

Eazel Tells All

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  • Cut/Copy/Paste (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check here [eazel.com] for my May 2000 post about cut/copy/paste feature.

    Back in May 2000 they knew it [eazel.com] wasn't on their schedule for the first release. 10 months and no time to implement it? Too bad Seth got let go since he was the only developer who was for it back then. Seth says continue hacking on Nautilus though.

    I thought cut/copy/paste was one of the main things a file manager did. Guess I never came from perspective a of a Mac User. I'm glad to see it finally got their attention now as their #2 on the wish list.

    1. Speed! (includes .jpg thumbnailing performance)
    2. Ability to more easily move files around (using either cut/copy/paste or shelf idea)
    3.View content of .tar, .rpm packages
    I believe the #1 hinderance is all the underlying technology Bonobo waiting for it to stabilize. That's also why Evolution is taking forever to develop. Once these start to stabilize applications will start flowing out quicker. It'll happen just now as quickly as most had thought.

    Also I like #7 on the wish list
    7. A no-frills, lean and mean file manager (no Mozilla, no services)
    I know tons of hours and effort has gone into Nautilus and appreciate each developer who has worked on it. Just wish they stick to a few basics rather than "Medusa, which indexes your entire hard drive"
    isn't Medusa like that evil "Find Fast" that came with Office 97 which slows down the computer to a halt. Why we going there?

    Also what's this all about "Maciej: So Reef is the project to implement our new services architecture. It is based around the concept of Service View Bundles (SVBs), downloadable self-contained bundles of script code, images, and other resources (for example html or glade files). These bundles are going to be signed by Eazel and will run inside Nautilus"

    Wasn't this what was all about the MS IE Security Patch or how does it differ?

    _______________________________________ adam www.kaikun.org [kaikun.org] 5,000 photos

  • Re:Check out debian (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you love Debian, email randomform@users.sourceforge.net [mailto] and let him know!
  • Not terribly useful information. It's a release candidate, so of course there's no guarantee it'll work on everyone's system. If all the bugs were out, they'd take the "Candidate" out of "Release Candidate". :)

    Be patient. Carping on slashdot will not make the final release arrive any faster. Installing the release candidate and submitting bug reports just might.
  • So tell me - is it a good thing for Eazel to "manage" the software on my computer - and if so, is it also a good thing for Microsoft or the FBI to do the same?

    That's up to you. I'm not interested in having any of those people "manage" my software and it doesn't sound like a business with a lot of potential customers, but if they can sell it then good luck to them.

  • Not actually true, BSDi pays Jordan K. Hubbard's salary - he's the release coordinator and public relations guy, as well as being one of the founding members of the project. Jordan used to receive his paycheck from Walnut Creek before the merger.
    There are also a few people who work in the FreeBSD labs, I assume they were also Walnut Creek employees. No idea what their status is now.
  • A few years ago there seemed to be a lot of sensitivity in the GNOME team to resisting bloat and keeping things lean and focused. That seems to be gone now. It's almost as though a lot of the development has gotten sucked into these new companies and everyone has powerful new PC's and they've forgotten where they came from.

    I can't imagine that any of the top developers of Nautilus or Evolution have tried to run these things on hardware that's more than a year old. Seperately they labor along, running them together will bring a strong system to its knees.

    Somewhere along the way GNOME's component architecture has gone wrong. I only need my file manager and my web browser to be aquainted, I don't need them to be intimate. But now I get the overhead from one every time I start the other. Evolution is the same way, why do I need overhead my scheduler every time I start my email?

    Their new file indexing scheme is another example. Suddenly I'm waking up every morning to the sound of medusa still trying to thrash my disk into stone two hours after it started. It's old machine, guys, I don't have that much disk.

    I've always prefered GNOME because I liked the look and feel and the flexibility that it gave me without too much overhead. I also never cared for the look of KDE and I was wary of their licensing issues. But it looks like it's time to give KDE a try. GNOME appears to have been set adrift in a sea of venture capital. Until the last of that cash finally swirls down the drain I see no sign that they're going to get back on the right track.

  • It's not about competition, it's about fragmentation. I don't want to see the same thing happening between Eazel and Ximian that's already happened between GNOME and KDE.
  • I'm pretty impressed with Eazel developers. They spotted my All Your Base t-shirt today at the Olive Garden in Palo Alto. The first ones all day to know what it meant!
  • I think their online storage is going to have a hard time competing with streamload.com [streamload.com], which is unlimited.
  • How's she holdin up?
  • if services are available, and anyone can impliment them, seems like most services in one way or another will end up being free.

    I like free.

  • , but they are in the high priced tech areas to attract talent

    Bull. Speaking from experience, San Francisco has anything BUT the cream of the crop. In fact, the real reason is the damn market index. Part of the calculation of a companies worth is based on their location. Because Silicon Valley was a technology hotbed, any tech company that is located there will automatically be worth more. If you're looking for real talent, check Chicago or New York, or even (GASP!) Wisconsin. All you are bound to find in SF is a bunch of know-nothings that want to make money the easy way.

  • I understand what you are saying about price wars and healthy competition. However, I think the merger would be the "best case scenario." Otherwise, Eazel is likely to go under. *If* they could stay afloat long enough to make a profit and *if* the market was large enough to support this competition, then that is the way to go. But the market, as it stands, is not large enough and I don't see Ximian choosing Eazel's software service in their Gnome distribution. A combined company would avert the threat of divergences in Gnome and lead to better integration.
  • We wouldn't want competition, that would lead to price wars and each company trying to 1 up the other in there products causing constant development and new better stuff.
  • 1> about the jpg thumbnailing, Explorer (on NTFS) thumbnail the image once, and store it in a ADS, so it's very fast. Can you do the same on Linux?

    I think Medusa is like Index Server in Windows, not the half ass attempt that Find Fast was.
  • wuftpd?
    I don't like it, but anyone who want to hack my computer would surely love to have me running it.
  • Forget speed & keyboard navigation for a moment.
    What do you *mean*, you can't move files around.
    It's not a file manager, then, it's a file viewer, at best.

    (One of the reasons I don't like most of linux's GUI programs is that you often have to resort to the mouse to use the GUI, which sucks)
  • I'd certainly tend to agree with you there. I am learning to code myself in the hopes that one day I will be able to contribute something to the community which has served me so well.

    Many linux users can often expect too much, open source is not there to be complained about, it is there to be improved.

    I hope more users realise this, and stop expecting open source programmers to create a product which will do every single thing they want. It is impossible to accomodate to every users needs. However, with open source the individual has the ability to cater for their own needs.

    Consider open source to be like a buffet, YOU choose what YOU want to eat.

  • My personal opinion (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
  • I don't believe that someone working in Linux for so long should remain in ignorance.

    FVWM, Saig Office, Midnight Commander and GNU-utilities like tar, ls, gcc, ftp and many more lightweight X and console tools are terrific for the lightweight lean mean user and are all actively maintained. NCurses is better than ever with bindings in Ada, C++ and other languages. Tex is still going strong.

    They are great! They are cool, and they can impress women, and better than everything else they free your dependance on Nautilus. Go try them today!


    ~^~~^~^^~~^
  • ...not in the hope of ever getting a return, but in order to make sure the default Solaris 9+ desktop (Gnome) continue to evolve. And to make Solaris support a priority among the developers.

    All the various Unix and/or hardware companies switching from CDE to Gnome have some interest in seing it continue to evolve.
  • Well if they are relying on venture capital funds until their business model does turn a profit, then they do have a point. Not every business is profitable from the start. To make matters worse, where some of these dot coms are located makes basic expenses such as office space very high. In many cases the internet allows them to be located just about anywhere, but they are in the high priced tech areas to attract talent (why not have the basic business staff & headquarters located someplace cheap, and if need by have the techs telecommute?) So not only are they not bringing in much revenue, they are bleeding red ink like a stuck pig due to high expenses. Unless you have a very patient VC, this won't last for long. Given the slide that we've been in for the past year, the VCs aren't being patient.

  • The only problems that I had compiling it was due to not having the appropriate gnome libraries. The configure script barfed a couple times, so I went to a Gnome mirror, pulled down the latest versions of the packages it wanted, and continued. Other than that, their compile instructions were easy to follow. It took a while to compile, but that wasn't a big issue for me.

  • Well, we all know that PHBs' perceptions often do not match with reality. A dot com may start up in the Bay Area because they _think_ they will be able to attract talent (and pretend to be hip & trendy at the same time) worth paying the high rent. In reality, they may be getting the same as what they could get in another city, but still have the higher rent. A dot com moved her last year because they needed to turn down their 'burn rate'. They recently annouced that they are going out of business, but they delayed it a year.

  • > I don't know about these guys, but "1.0" means
    > that the product is ready for the masses. That
    > means tested and working, most features are
    > in place and there are binaries for the major
    > Linux platforms.

    Take it in context. 1.0 of any product is rarely stable and full of all the features that 3.0 has. They got 1.0 out there so that people could play with it. They did it for the exact reasons they state. So why are you trying to villify them?

    Methinks you are trying to play the karma-whore by quoting a lot of redundant text from the article and then proceed to call them idiots for doing exactly what they said they'd do!

    Grab the rpm src file and you can install it on any RPM based distro: rpm --rebuild blah.src.rpm

  • Minneapolis, MN has some good people in it too, and some of them even like the weather. :-)

  • The Gnome project itself releases the packages in source format. The best way to get binaries currently is from Ximian; they'll be releasing binaries for Gnome 1.4 sometime soon after the final release. They currently support about 9 different platforms, one of which is Solaris. Both Sun and HP are doing internal testing of the Gnome 1.4 platform also.
    ----
  • And after you put your troll-filters on and read the useful posts from the Gnotices thread, be sure to actually read the interview this /. article is about to see how the issues are being addressed.
    ----
  • Cut/Copy/Paste has been working in the Nautilus hourlies for about a week now, FYI, not that it's something you should necessarily expect from a file manager. There are many different paradigms. Windows Explorer is the only file manager (or at least the first--others have copied it) that uses it. There's also the Take/Do paradigm, or the shelf idea. Lots of possibilities.
    ----
  • For heaven's sake, keyboard navigation, speed, and ability to move files around?

    Nautilus already has keyboard navigation, is decently fast, and you can move files around quite easily. What the Nautilus developers are doing is soliciting feedback on how they can improve these qualities--i.e. complete and consistent keyboard navigation, even faster performance, and better methods for managing files. Nautilus 1.0 arrived at the basic framework; it's very usable and impressive. But now the developers can look ahead to adding some serious features. Since the framework is there, some of these additions have been quick to arrive. Already in the hourly builds there is cut/copy/paste functionality, arbitrary script execution on selected files, preferences for displaying directories before files and adding an option to delete directly instead of moving to trash. There have been some speed tuneups I've seen tossed into CVS as well.
    ----

  • The thing that worries me that is any product that is tied to a company such as this needs to make money for that company. The first thing they will try to do is get it established as some sort of standard, something that seems to be happening. Then what happens is you get bugged endlessly to use their "services", or maybe the product is not fully functional without some sort of subscription. I have used Nautilus and all of it's asscociated bits. It seems to be that it does not do a real lot, except give them a window into your desktop for thier services and tie everything into it as a dependency.

    Geez .. a nice little file manager would have done ok. Who needs them.
  • It didn't really matter that we fired half the people here because they didn't have anything to spend the money on anyways because we supplied all the coke and pizza they could eat and a place to sleep. Most of them have moved back in with their parents and now we get all their code for free which is a good thing cause we're never gunna make any money off writing an open source Mac gui for linux.
  • Nautilus runs on Solaris. This was something I put a lot of work into prior to release. We're not releasing binaries, but rather have been assisting Sun in creating their own performance pack for GNOME. Hopefully this will impact the largest number of Solaris users.

    Nautilus also has packages available in Mandrake Cooker, I believe.

    cheers,

    -Seth
  • 1. Speed! (includes .jpg thumbnailing performance)
    2. Ability to more easily move files around (using either cut/copy/paste or shelf idea)
    3. View content of .tar, .rpm packages
    4. Ability to delete files directly without going through the Trash folder
    5. Integrated shell features
    6. Better browser functionality (inc. Download functionality, Mozilla related problems etc.)
    7. A no-frills, lean and mean file manager (no Mozilla, no services)
    8. Better MIME type support
    9. Clean quit
    10. Elegant way to drop app launcher icons on the desktop
    11. Better keyboard navigation
    12. Bootstrap installer better recovery after failures
    13. Sort directories before individual files are listed
    14. Text on desktop more readable
    15. Stability
    16. More previews (HTML, pdf)
    17. Automount floppies
    18. SMB support
    19. Root password popup box
    20. TLC to Tree View and List View (easy Rename in List View, for example)
    21. Virtual folders not just as bookmarks

    Isn't this just a list of features, most of which should be in a file manager from the very beginning? For heaven's sake, keyboard navigation, speed, and ability to move files around?

    What is up with today's software anyway, if it doesn't even do what it's name implies?

  • "It's been a tough time around Eazel. However, we managed to keep most of the core engineering team intact, and there is a lot of energy now. I like the way Bud Tribble, our VP of Engineering, put it: "We have a lot of momentum. We've lost some mass. So that means we have to increase velocity." And it's been happening - we've been achieving things in a matter of weeks that would have taken months before."

    Since we shitcanned half our people, the rest of us have been working like dogs, pulling much overtime to keep our already underpaying jobs and we realize now that there's no way in hell we'll get this done in time.

  • What exactly is the business model for Eazel? How are they expecting to turn a profit ever? How (besides the now dried-up venture capital) will they pay their engineers and sustain a viable company?

    If you look at their website [eazel.com], you will notice that they have corporate dealings with Sun Microsystems [sun.com], Red Hat Linux [redhat.com], and Dell [dell.com]. They also are partnered with Xythos [xythos.com] and Loudcloud [loudcloud.com].

    They may not be turning over a profit yet, but they are working toward making a profit with a product that may be an innovation.

  • I am impressed. They seem to be listening to the Gnome community. Their list of feedback and suggestions actually reflected the criticism and feedback they received on Gnotices. I look forward to their next release, but in the meantime I will not be using Nautilus. I doubt they will remain in business long enough to make a profit, but I wish them all the best. IMHO, the best case scenario at this point would be an Eazel/Ximian merge. They each have qualities and philosophies that benefit the Gnome community and a merger would end the duplication of efforts. Either way, Red-Carpet is the superior software delivery tool and Eazel should just abandon this avenue to Ximian.
  • I spoke with Maciej? from Eazel at the recent linuxworld expo in New York. I asked him about Eazel's plans for KDE... He responded that there were a lot of interesting conversations going on between Ximian, Eazel and some of the KDE community about implementing bonobo. The conversation was not very specific, but the overall tone was that KDE was within Eazel and Ximian's radar. Perhaps more cooperation between the KDE and Gnome communities will be possible within this corporate framework?

  • What I'd Like to Know (Score:3)

    by mholve ( 1101 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @04:59PM (#325998)
    Is when they plan on releasing binaries for the platforms that have vowed to include GNOME in the next release of their OSes - namely Sun Solaris and HP HP/UX...

    So far, only Redhat and Debian have releases available to them.

    This is a very visible time for both Eazel and GNOME, and they need to get on the ball. Especially since these new platforms can do a lot of good to those projects.

  • Re:Very Sad (Score:3)

    by Skeezix ( 14602 ) <jamin@pubcrawler.org> on Friday March 30, 2001 @08:39PM (#325999) Homepage
    The economic slowdown has had a profound effect on a great many companies. I was layed off a couple of weeks ago at a company that a year ago was making a lot of sales and things were looking up. Economy slows down, sales go down, people get layed off--happens.

    As far as how Eazel will make money, you have to be creative and think outside the box a bit. The answer is corporate partnerships, services, support. I don't claim to have the inside scoop on what things Eazel is exploring behind the scenes, but a few things jump out readily:

    1. Customizations, enhancements, add-on components and feature requests funded by other companies. As the Gnome platform gains popularity there will be an increase in the need for third party products to integrate well with it. I can see Eazel writing custom views, components and services that integrate with Nautilus for third party vendors.

    2. Services. Read anything about .NET web services? Read the interview where it talks about Reef? The possibilities are endless here and it's hard to say where it will be 5 years down the road; it's a rapidly evolving paradigm. Not only can I see users paying for network delievered services, but I can see third party vendors paying Eazel for integration so that their service becomes part of the suite of services integrated with Nautilus.

    3. Support. With Gnome popularity rising rapidly there will be more and more demand for support and on-demand fixes and enhancements. Who better to do it than the companies (Ximian and Eazel) who employ some of the best Gnome hackers in the world?

    4. Actually selling the software. This one may come as a shock to some of you. Yes, you can sell free software. Red Hat and others have done it. Eazel could too. I could see Eazel selling, for example, a boxed set containing Nautilus (and perhaps the entire Gnome platform) along with a manual for newbies and perhaps gobs of extra stuff--backgrounds, Nautilus themes, icons, more emblems, viewers and components that work with Nautilus (Open Office, various media plugins, etc.), perhaps some extra media files like mp3s and .wavs for previewing in Nautilus.

    Anyway, just a few ideas that sprung to my head. The bright folks at Eazel no doubt have many more ideas being lined up right now...
    ----

  • Re:Just a thought... (Score:3)

    by abelsson ( 21706 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @12:09AM (#326000) Homepage
    I'd say it hits 1 (possibly),7,8,11,17,19,20 too.

    I just don't see any compelling reason to change from KDE 2 to Gnome/Natilus. The KDE desktop is clearly more advanced, and i can always keep the GTK+ libs installed to run usefull gtk programs. But Konqueror is clearly the killer app. It's somewhere between IE 4 and IE5 now, without the backing of the worlds largest software company. And that they've mananged to write a webbrowser that beats everything out there (for linux) without any webdeveloper support (how many people test their pages for konq. compability?) is just amazing.

    -henrik

  • Worst is yet to come? (Score:3)

    by Matthew Smith ( 201610 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @06:10PM (#326001)
    Christian: As mentioned in the previous question you have yet to secure your third round of funding. How serious is this situation?

    Bart Decrem: Actually, we've only had one round of venture capital funding. But one thing is for sure: things are a lot different today than a year ago, when we closed our last round, or even a few months ago, when Ximian secured financing. The reality is, the US economy is headed into a recession, dot-coms are going out of business all around us, venture capital funds are taking severe beatings and Linux stocks are down a lot. So a year ago, investors were willing to bet on unproven but potentially huge future markets. Today, investors are a lot more risk averse[...]

    This is not exactly optimistic. It sounds as if they are wholly dependent on securing the next round of funding. Given the performance of linux stocks in recent months I'd say they are extremely unlikely to get any more money. Methinks they're doomed.

  • Just a thought... (Score:3)

    by bLitzfeuer ( 318604 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @06:55PM (#326002)

    It seems to me that Konqueror [konqueror.org] hits 2,3,4,5,6,13,15,16(SMB) and 18, of the Nautilus wish list. Mind you that this is without commercial backing (and with a clear conscience now that Qt has been GPL'd).

    Maybe eazel could write an IO slave [kde.org] for Konqueror that can access the eazel services, that could increase thier potential revenues, no?

  • Hear Hear!! (Score:4)

    by chabotc ( 22496 ) <chabotc AT gmail DOT com> on Friday March 30, 2001 @07:27PM (#326003) Homepage
    I'm afraid i mostly agree on this observation. Most of the new linux users seem altogether happy to slam every move a linux developer makes. Wether its the question if the 2.4 kernel can run embeded devices or on 65000 cpu's, mozilla not being standard enough, or to bloated cause of trying to folow all the standards, or now nautilus.

    And the odds are very big these are all people who will never contribute a single line of source code, or documentation, or help fellow linux users out. Obviously they just see open source as 'free software', and not as open source, as we come to know and love it.

    I think the most apropiate responce would be a old timer responce from the linux-kernel list
    "Don't talk, code"

    Show us in code what is the 'better' way, fix those bugs, add those features, trim the bloat, document and translate and be welcomed in the world of open source!

    None of the apps you love using today (enlightenment, gnome, kde, bind, wuftpd, apache etc) came into existance by hords of users complaining about bloatware and bugs, they came into existance because people disliked bloat and bugs and -did something about it-

    just my 2 cnts (Hfl)

    -- Chris Chabot
    "I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @05:16PM (#326004)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Good old days (Score:5)

    by On Lawn ( 1073 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @06:19PM (#326005) Journal
    Two years ago, we were happy about advances in Linux usability and technology. We were a happy band, encouraging and helpful.

    Now? Well we've grown out of the innocent outskirts and hit the big city. Screams of "this is bloated", "this sucks", "this doesn't work" and "this will never work, fall from the greasy windows of tall concrete buildings.

    Some from MS plants, some from idiots that want us to stop and look at them, and some jealous that they will never get true credit for something good.

    Its been a year since we noticed the change from real hackers to wannabe managers on slashdot. And in the confusion, I sit back like many unheard others that think 'I could use this' and 'this is actualy pretty cool'.

    So for anyone who is wondering if slashdot shows a cross section of the linux community, rest assured it doesn't. You are invited to join us and let the trolls stamp around in their own go-nowhere lives.


    ~^~~^~^^~~^

  • Issues w/Nautilus and GNOME (Score:5)

    by mholve ( 1101 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @05:04PM (#326006)
    Be sure to also read "GNOME 1.4 Release Candidate 1 available" [gnome.org] over on the Gnotices [gnome.org] site, and see all the issues that are arising because of Nautilus' inclusion in the next GNOME.

    There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed like instability, inability to compile on various platforms, bloat and other things.

    Be careful before you rush in to embrace it.

  • Here's their business model (Score:5)

    by Carnage4Life ( 106069 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @05:57PM (#326007) Homepage Journal
    They plan to make money off of Eazel Online Storage [eazel.com] and Eazel Software Catalog [eazel.com].

    Eazel Online Storage

    This is similar to the technology made popular by X-drive [xdrive.com] that allows users to create a virtual drive that actual exists on a remote server. The problem with this technology is that it is expensive for the service provider (hard drive space and bandwidth) and from what I've seen from the online file storage market [yahoo.com] is that a lot of them (e.g. X-drive) have given up on the consumer market because of economies of scale and will instead try to capture the business market. Online file storage seems to be at best a break-even part of teh business instead of one that will generate enough profits to cover the cost of software development.

    Eazel Software Catalog

    This seems similar to RedHat's download page [redhat.com], where one can obtain software from a web interface instead of via FTP. One hopes that they also plan to have something like RedHat's up2date or Debian's apt-get to distinguish themselves, if not then it isn't worth signing up for. Again, I don't see this as a great profit generator.

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