Eazel

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi everyone,

For the last few days, there have been rumors floating around that Eazel
is going out of business.

I regret to inform you that Eazel is in fact shutting down.   Over the
past six months, our board members and executives worked tirelessly to
secure financing for the company.  Unfortunately, the high tech capital
markets have all but dried up and we have been unable to secure funding.

In the midst of these difficult times, our hackers have managed to hit
two major milestones for Nautilus: our 1.0 and 1.0.3 releases.  We would
like to express our gratitude to the Eazel hackers for keeping their eye
on the ball over the past 2 months.  Thanks also to all of our friends
who've been so supportive these last few months, in particular the more
than 100 members of the GNOME community who are hacking on Nautilus and
the folks who sent us money via Paypal (we
sent you tshirts and thank-you cards).

Here's what to expect over the coming days and weeks: over the next day
or so, the Eazel web site will be shut down, Eazel's online services
will be discontinued, and the Nautilus bootstrap installer will no
longer be able to fetch files from our software catalog.  We'll make
sure that the users of our online storage are able to retrieve their
files, and we are sending out mail to all our registered users.  Andy
Hertzfeld has generously offered to host what will remain of the Eazel
web site and all the Nautilus resources will continue to be available.
The source code, CVS repository and binaries have always been hosted on
gnome.org, and this will continue.  Our Bugzilla repository, the
Nautilus mailing lists and other Nautilus resources (such as the RSS
feed etc.) will be hosted by Andy.  E-mail to former employees'
eazel.com address will be forwarded at least for the next few weeks, and
resumes for some of our former employees will be posted on the remaining
web site. The company's assets will be sold to pay off our creditors, so
it's conceivable that the Eazel trademark or domain name will be
purchased by a company that has no relationship to the current Eazel.

Nautilus is licensed under the GPL, so the software will live on and, we
hope, continue to improve.  It is my understanding that Darin, Andy, and
several other key Nautilus contributors plan to continue to work on
Nautilus on a volunteer basis.  Expect to hear from Darin and Andy
shortly.  Miguel has indicated that he and others at Ximian will also
contribute to Nautilus to ensure that it continues on as the file
manager for GNOME and meets the users' needs.

If you haven't tried out Nautilus 1.0.3, please do so - there are
numerous new features and bug fixes and performance has improved since
the 1.0 release.  The source code for Nautilus 1.0.3 is available at
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/Public/GNOME/stable/latest/sources/nautilus-1.0.3.tar.gz.
Nautilus upgrades will also be distributed through Red Hat Network and
through Ximian's Red Carpet.  Now's a great time to check out Nautilus,
and an even better time to roll up your sleeves, get involved with
Nautilus, and prove to the world that free software can thrive even when
its corporate sponsors run out of steam.

Like many of the people who worked at Eazel, I fully plan to stay
involved with free software and GNOME.  On behalf of everyone from
Eazel, *thank you* for having welcomed us into the free software family,
and GO GNOME!

Bart
and The Eazel Team

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