From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson (eh@mad.scientist.com)
Date: Tue May 15 2001 - 18:42:08 PDT
I'm very sorry to see this, right on the heels of their V1.0 release.
2.0 would probably have been a killer app. and helped more people see
the virtues of Free Software on the desktop--which is still considered a
radical proposition for reasons that I can sometimes see if I cock my
head at the right angle.
In a way this is really pretty strange, and must be a post-dot-com VC
panic. Eazel was not being unprofitable when the business plan said it
should be. Well, actually, I've not seen the business plan... I did
see Ximian's and it was pretty scary.
The business-failure of Eazel (who never even deployed their
services-for-fees model) is disturbing because I fear that it will
poison the waters for funding similar projects. I think there is still
a viable business in providing well integrated services. I don't think
anyone will be interested in providing venture capital, though.
Eirikur
attached mail follows:
As Bart said in his recent email, Eazel is shutting down.
Some people are probably wondering what's up with packages maintained by
former Eazel employees. Here is the status for a few of them:
Nautilus -- I'll continue to be the maintainer of Nautilus for the
foreseeable future. I have time to devote to GNOME for now and I plan to
continue to work to enhance Nautilus. Short term directions for Nautilus
will include performance improvements and a fix to the session manager
problem that plagues many 1.0.3 users. Longer term plans include porting
to the GNOME 2 platform. We'll need some new blood -- new volunteers to
get involved -- to help out the old hands that remain. Andy Hertzfeld is
going to continue to contribute, and Ramiro Estrugo probably will too
(Ramiro's out of town right now). John Sullivan may be working on Nautilus
too, but he's about to take a long vacation, so he'll be out for a while.
Some of the other familiar faces from Eazel might show up too, but these
are the guys who specifically told me they'd continue to contribute.
gnome-vfs -- Ian McKellar <yakk@yakk.net> is going to take over as
gnome-vfs maintainer. The good news is that gnome-vfs is already working
as part of the GNOME 2 platform. Short term priorities for gnome-vfs
include filling out the documentation for programmers and finishing a new
API for handling authentication (done by Mike Fleming). I'd also like to
see a Samba module and an ssh module to fill out the kinds of file systems
that gnome-vfs works with, but we don't have any volunteers for that yet.
eel -- The library formerly known as libnautilus-extensions will be
maintained by Ramiro Estrugo <ramiro@fateware.com> and me. The main thing
planned here is conversion to GNOME 2. In the long run, we'd like to see
most of this library move into real platform libraries, so this library
becomes obsolete.
librsvg -- Ramiro and I will also maintain this library for now.
Switching this over to GNOME 2 is the top priority. The overlap between
this library and libart is something someone might want to tackle in the
GNOME 2.0 time frame.
ammonite -- The main purpose of this library is to support Eazel
Services. The maintainer, Mike Fleming <mikef@praxis.etla.net>, may want
to keep it going, but I think it's more likely that he'll retire it soon.
trilobite -- The main purpose of this library is to support Eazel
Services. The maintainer, Eskil Heyn Olsen <eskil.olsen@sol.dk> may want
to keep it going. There's some good package management stuff in here,
including the Nautilus package view, but I think it's more likely that he'
ll retire it soon.
Some other stuff:
mailing lists -- I'd like to move some mailing lists from eazel.com to
gnome.org at some point. We might want to shut down some of the lists, but
we definitely want to keep nautilus-list, at least. You can see the list
of lists at <http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/>.
bugzilla -- I'd like to eventually move all the bugs from
bugzilla.eazel.com to bugzilla.gnome.org. If we use an algorithm that maps
bug numbers in a consistent way (perhaps with some constant offset), then
we can replace the Eazel bugzilla with a forwarding system so that old
links to bugs could continue to work. If someone wants to work with me on
this, please contact me by email. (It's OK if we lose the "time estimate",
"inclination", and "target milestone" fields in this transition.)
IRC channel #nautilus -- I haven't been around the last few days, but
I promise I'll be back hanging around there a bit more. Maybe we can even
get Andy to start using IRC!
tinderbox -- Having a Tinderbox for Nautilus and the packages it uses
has been really great during the development of Nautilus 0.1 through 1.0.3.
One of the best parts for Nautilus testing was the availability of
"hourly" builds in both source form and RPM packages. Ian was even working
on making "hourly" builds in Debian package format too. Robin Slomkowski
<robin@slomkowski.net> is willing to work with other GNOME hackers to get
one set up. He knows a lot about making both the Tinderbox server itself
and the build machines work smoothly. You might want to send him mail if
you are willing to work with him.
If you have other questions, feel free to send them to one of the relevant
mailing lists.
I'll be around.
-- Darin
_______________________________________________
Nautilus-list mailing list
Nautilus-list@lists.eazel.com
http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 17 2001 - 14:06:15 PDT