Eazel was an American

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

company operating from 1999 to 2001 in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

and then

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...

. The company's flagship product is the

Nautilus The nautilus (, ) is a pelagic marine mollusc of the cephalopod family Nautilidae. The nautilus is the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and of its smaller but near equal suborder, Nautilina. It comprises six living species in ...

file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or pr ...

for the GNOME

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphica ...

on Linux, which was immediately adopted and maintained by the

free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

. As the core of Eazel's business model, it is an early example of cloud storage services in the form of personal file storage, transparently and portably stored on the Internet. Renamed to Files, this application continues to be a centerpiece of the free

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

-based desktop environment.

History

Eazel was founded by Andy Hertzfeld in August 1999 in Mountain View, California. It had 22 initial employees and raised from several venture capital investment companies. Initially, all the programmers worked on every aspect of the product and eventually specialized on its components. The company grew from 22 employees in 1999 to 75 employees in 2001 and was named one of the top 10 companies to watch among "earsplitting buzz surrounding Linux", by ''Red Herring'' magazine. Staff consisted of former employees of many luminary technology companies such as

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

, Netscape, Be Inc.,

Linuxcare Linuxcare is an American IT services company founded in San Francisco in 1998 by Dave Sifry, Arthur Tyde and Dave LaDuke. The company's initial goal was to be "the 800 number for Linux" and operate 24 hours a day. Due to the dot-com bubble of the e ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Mike Boich was CEO, having been a major figure at Apple and co-founder of

Radius In classical geometry, a radius ( : radii) of a circle or sphere is any of the line segments from its center to its perimeter, and in more modern usage, it is also their length. The name comes from the latin ''radius'', meaning ray but also the ...

;

Bud Tribble Guy L. "Bud" Tribble is Vice President of Software Technology at Apple Inc. Work Tribble was a member of the original Apple Macintosh design team. He served as manager of the software development team, and helped to design the classic Mac OS and ...

was VP of Engineering, having been software manager and a designer of the original

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

project;

Andy Hertzfeld Andrew Jay Hertzfeld (born April 6, 1953) is an American software engineer and innovator who was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for App ...

was a principal designer, having been a lead software engineer and a designer of the original Macintosh project;

Darin Adler Darin Adler was the technical lead for Apple Computer's System 7 operating system release. During 1985–1987 he worked for ICOM Simulations as primary developer of the MacVenture game engine which ran Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True, Uninvi ...

led development, having been the technical lead for

System 7 System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple C ...

for the Macintosh; and Susan Kare designed new

vector graphics Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display ...

-based iconography, having designed the original Macintosh icons. Other staff included programmer

Maciej Stachowiak Maciej Stachowiak (; born June 6, 1976) is a Polish American software developer currently employed by Apple Inc., where he is a leader of the development team responsible for the WebKit Framework. A longtime proponent of open source software, St ...

, who was a programmer and board member for GNOME; and board member Michael Homer, formerly of Apple, AOL, and Netscape. Eazel's flagship product is the

for the GNOME desktop environment. In this, the company faced several simultaneous challenges: creating a lot of intricate user-facing software from scratch or from existing code which must target all the disparate Linux environment versions; integrating a corporate personality into the existing and outspoken volunteer community of the GNOME desktop environment; building upon a very small nascent market of Linux desktop users among an already widely served and monopolized desktop computing market; and monetizing free software for individual consumers by creating essential business services. In other words, Eazel sought to switch a groundswell of users from Macintosh and Windows to a new and immature system that free software users would want to pay for. Of the two predominant free desktop environments for Linux, the choice to target GNOME instead of KDE was made largely because of the questionable legality of the Qt license upon which KDE was based. In December 2000, Dell invested a "substantial stake" in Eazel and committed to preloading Nautilus on its Linux-based desktop and laptop systems, while Eazel preannounced its core business services which were woven directly into the free Nautilus application. Described as the "network user experience", those services are the Software Catalog to aid users in locating and installing applications, and Eazel Online Storage for easily storing and browsing files via their desktop or web browser. The company failed to successfully monetize, or to secure more funding before venture capital ran out, and the technology market changed drastically in the two years of the company's lifespan. On March 13, 2001, Eazel simultaneously launched the first release of Nautilus (version 1.0), and laid off most of its 75 employees in an attempt to secure funding in its final few months. The company attempted to sell its core development group but ceased operations on May 15, 2001. Hertzfeld arranged a meeting with Steve Jobs and most of Apple's high level management. In June 2001, most of Eazel's final roster of senior engineers joined Apple's Safari team, including

, Don Melton,

, John Sullivan, Ken Kocienda, and

Legacy

Received positively, the Nautilus file manager was incorporated into GNOME since GNOME version 1.4. GNOME has renamed Nautilus to Files and now refers to some of Eazel's early concept of "network user experience" as " cloud storage", which is provisioned by a variety of sources including the complimentary

Google Drive Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In add ...

. Files is continuously maintained by the

as a centerpiece of the free

-based desktop environment.

References

External links

GNOME Files
{{FLOSS Linux companies GNOME companies Free software companies Defunct software companies of the United States Companies based in Mountain View, California

History

Legacy

See also

References

External links