Eazel

[Mike Boich <mike eazel com>]

Dear Gnome hackers and supporters:

I'm writing this post on behalf of Eazel to introduce ourselves to the
Gnome community.  We're a 15 person (and growing) company dedicated to
making Linux a better desktop environment than either Windows or
Macintosh.  For the past several months, we have been working closely
with a number of Gnome hackers on Nautilus, the Gnome file manager for
Gnome 2.0.

Some Background

The company was founded by Andy Hertzfeld, Bart Decrem, and myself (Mike
Boich).  Andy is a primary author of the original Macintosh OS, and
later cofounded General Magic.  He's passionate about making computers
easy to use. Bart founded and ran Plugged In, a non-profit that has led
the way in providing computer and Internet access to low-income
communities. I worked at Apple in the early Macintosh days as the first
"software evangelist", and have been involved in starting and running
companies since then.

All of us are enthusiastic believers in Open Source. After evaluating
the various paths to a superior desktop environment (start from
scratch,  build on KDE, build on Gnome), Gnome was our unanimous
choice.  This is due to a combination of the excellent work that has
already been done on Gnome, its GPL license, and the Gnome hackers we've
had the opportunity to meet.

After we described our plans to Miguel and showed him the prototype that
we had developed, he suggested that we should merge our efforts with
those of Ettore Perrazoli who had begun working on GnomeFM as a
replacement for GMC.  By this time, Elliot Lee had also begun working on
Nautilus, starting with Ettore's code and generalizing it to become a
extensible viewer for other types of information.   In December, we
concluded that it made sense to use the work done by Ettore and Elliot
as the foundation to build on.

Current Eazel hackers working on Nautilus are: Darin Adler, Ramiro
Estrugo, Andy Hertzfeld, Maciej Stachowiak, and John Sullivan.  George
Lebl is a half-time employee here and is focusing on integrating the
Gnome panel with Nautilus.  We are actively hiring technical people,
both to work on Nautilus and also on web-based services and other
usability improvements.  If you're interested in working at Eazel,
contact Bart Decrem (bart@eazel.com).

Now that we're no longer in "stealth mode", we plan to be more active in
the Gnome community.  You may have already seen articles about us on
CNet, Slashdot, the New York Times or elsewhere.  Later today, we'll
post links to those articles on our web site.  We hope that those
articles will provide you with useful additional information.  We have
also posted a summary of our plans for Nautilus on the Developer section
of our web site (www.eazel.com).  The site (and the Developer section in
particular) will become more informative over the next few months.

We look forward to meeting more Gnome hackers and other members of the
Gnome community, and collaborating with you on making Gnome great!

Mike Boich
Eazel
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