“I think the promise of the personal computer revolution ran
into a dead end. It ended up in a cul-de-sac because of the
proprietary systems,” says Andy Hertzfeld, one of the core
developers of the original Apple Macintosh, who helped found Eazel.
Hertzfeld and two other Mac veterans, Mike Boich and Guy “Bud”
Tribble, fiercely defend their decision to go the open source route
when they founded their company 11 months ago.”
“When you ask people what frustrates them with their computer,”
Tribble says, “the answer will be, ‘I installed new software and
downloaded things from the Web . . . then everything starts getting
flaky.’ “That’s the ease-of-use problem of the millennium,” Tribble
says.”
“Eazel’s proposed solution, Tribble says, is to “marry a nice
GUI [graphical user interface]” with the robust and reliable Linux
operating system. Tribble adds that through its anticipated
online subscription service, “Eazel, over the Internet can come in
and help you install things so dependencies and setting up . . .
are correct,” Tribble says. “And if you screw it up, we can back
you out of that.”