“When the team that designed the original Apple Macintosh
got together to create a new face for Linux on the desktop, people
started to wonder if lightning could strike twice.“
“Mike Boich, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare and Bud Tribble – the
core of the group responsible for the PC that turned the computer
industry and popular culture on its head in the early 1980s – last
summer formed a company called Eazel. The team is working on a file
manager and graphical shell for the open source Gnome desktop
computing environment for Linux. Eazel’s graphical interface,
code-named Nautilus, will be downloadable for free on the Web this
summer, and also will be included in the subsequent version of Red
Hat’s Linux operating system (OS) for the desktop, as well as other
Linux distributions using Gnome. But Eazel has a bigger goal in
mind: giving Microsoft’s Windows a real run for its money as the
operating system of choice.”
“It’s my belief that both Windows and the Mac are not easy
enough to use for the average person,” says Hertzfeld, whose title
at the new privately held company is software wizard. “We would
like to make Linux a system you can just turn on and work on.”
“But that may be the easy part. Turning their contribution to
free software into a profit-making business – and earning the
respect of the Linux community they’ll have to work with to be
successful – is another mountain to climb. But the Eazel founders
are certain they have the right technology, people and timing to
pull it off.”