Eazel

» see eazel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I have used Nautilus for most of my working life without once thinking about where it came from. It is the file manager in GNOME, the window that opens when you click a folder on a Linux desktop, and on every machine I have had in Ankara it was simply part of the operating system. It was not. Somebody raised twelve million dollars to build it and went out of business doing it.

Eazel started in august 1999 in Mountain View. Andy Hertzfeld had written large parts of the original Macintosh system software fifteen years earlier and Bud Tribble had been on the same team, and the premise they put in front of investors was that Linux had already won on servers and would never win anywhere else while the desktop remained something you had to be paid to use. They opened with twenty-two people. Red Herring put them on a list of Linux companies worth watching.

The product was Nautilus, a file manager that tried to make a directory listing into something you would not mind looking at. It rendered thumbnails where it could instead of generic icons, and it had been designed rather than assembled out of whatever the toolkit provided. The business was supposed to be services delivered through that window, software updates and remote storage on a subscription. That second half never arrived in a form anyone paid for.

~ the dossier ~

~ what they were actually selling ~

The pitch was never really a file manager. Eazel wanted the desktop to become a delivery channel, so a Linux machine could keep itself patched and backed up without its owner ever learning package management. In 1999 that was close to heresy. It is now how every operating system on earth works, including the phone in your pocket, which makes the company early rather than wrong.

The trouble was the market they were early in. Red Hat could charge for support because businesses buy support, and businesses have budgets for the word maintenance. A desktop user in 2000 running a free operating system on a machine they had assembled themselves was not going to send anyone a monthly fee for a nicer folder window. Eazel had picked the one audience on the internet that had organized its entire identity around not paying for software.

~ the actual end ~

Nautilus 1.0 shipped on 13 march 2001. On the same day, Eazel laid off most of its seventy-five employees and kept a small group behind to raise another round while there was still something finished to point at. The timing was not an accident. Shipping was the last act available to the company that might have been worth money to an investor, and they spent it.

There was no investor. The venture market for Linux desktop companies had shut sometime in the previous year and it did not reopen for anybody. Eazel ceased operations on 15 may 2001, twenty-one months after it opened, having produced one release of one program.

~ the next chapter ~

Nautilus had already been folded into GNOME 1.4 in april 2001 under a free license, so the code survived the company by design and not by luck. It is still running. GNOME renamed it Files somewhere along the way and most people using it today have never encountered the older name, let alone the company that paid for it.

The engineers landed somewhere specific. In june 2001 a group of them went to Apple, Bud Tribble and Maciej Stachowiak among them, and worked on the browser that became Safari. So money raised to build a Linux desktop ended up buying, by an entirely unplanned route, a rendering engine that now sits on a billion phones. Nobody wrote that in the deck and nobody got paid for it.

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