Andrew Leonard offers a gloomy post-mortem on Eazel. The two
points of signifigance he seeks to make are that Free Software was
tolerated as geek excess in a more permissive economic period
wherein said geeks could do behave like rock stars, and that
Eazel’s departure from the scene has deprived him of a talking
point when defending the potential usability of the Linux
desktop.
…It’s impossible to say for sure, but one of the
factors that propelled free software development forward in recent
years is likely to have been the reality that programmer talent was
valued so highly by the marketplace that programmers could write
their own tickets. They could demand from their employers the right
to work on free software in their free time. In the permissive
dot-com era, they could put their Linux box right on the company
network and hack away whenever they felt like it.For a year or so, Eazel was a great soundbite for pundits
looking to declaim about the glories of free software’s future. I
know, because I was one of them. Whenever I was pressed about the
usability of Linux-based operating systems for the average
non-geek, I’d concede that desktop interfaces like GNOME and KDE
weren’t quite there yet. But I’d also always then quickly follow
with some statement to the effect of “but I’m really excited by the
entry of these Eazel developers into the fray. These are some of
the people who made the Macintosh into a success — they could
really make a big difference.”