Re: when companies join over free software projects

[Darin Adler <darin eazel com>]

on 8/14/00 4:23 PM, Mark Galassi at rosalia@galassi.org wrote:

> The person originally developing VFS and the file manager was doing it
> as a volunteer project.  When Helix Code employed him, they agreed in
> private discussions with Eazel that Eazel would work on those parts of
> GNOME.  The decisions was made by management at the two companies.
> 
> I would have preferred to see this carried out in the manner that
> befits free software projects: one hacker tells another "dude, do you
> mind if I take that over?  I have some great ideas; look at them --
> and don't you think you would enjoy working on this other thing more?"
> 
> You're at Helix Code.  Maybe you can correct this, or elucidate
> further.

I guess we don't want to deep end on this, but I'd like to correct this for
the record.

Andy Hertzfeld and other folks at Eazel were working on our own file manager
for GNOME, which we called Gnomad. We started on this because we thought we
could do some cool stuff with a new file manager for Unix. We didn't know
about Gnome-FM, a program Ettore had started that Andy didn't know about.

Miguel and Ettore asked us to take over Gnome-FM instead of doing a separate
program in parallel; Ettore wanted to work on something else as long as
*someone* was doing a file manager for GNOME 2.0. They also wanted us to use
C instead of C++. We agreed to do it the way they asked.

Miguel and Elliot asked us to do the work as part of the Bonobo shell Elliot
had started called Nautilus instead of a separate Gnome-FM program. We
agreed to this too, and took over maintenance of Nautilus. Elliot worked
with us on it for a while and then moved on to other things.

I don't see how this was weird or bad, and I don't think that it was caused
by us at Eazel being hackers working for a company -- Andy wanted to work on
a file manager for Linux before he started Eazel. If anything, our company
affiliation made Ettore and Elliot more cautious about working with us.

    -- Darin