Re: Eazel

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Just want to say thanks to the whole Eazel team. I have to say that
with Nautilus my machine finally feels like a real desktop operating
system - attractive, functional, stable, easy to use, useful error
messages (what a concept!). Topping it off the Nautilus code is clean
and maintainable.

We definitely went from GNOME 1.2 (biggest weakness was the file
manager) to GNOME 1.4 (we can now focus on other bits).  And it's
impressive that the Nautilus hackers responded to post-1.0 flames by
addressing the concerns people had in version 1.0.3, rather than by
flaming back. (Though I hope y'all will keep standing up for good
user-tested UI against the Gnotices trolls when appropriate ;-)

One of the greatest things about Eazel was the quality of the people
they brought to the GNOME community; if we can learn to review code
like Darin, design a UI like Andy, or herd cats like Bart, then we
can't fail to succeed. I'm pretty happy that so many of the Eazel
ex-employees are staying around to add to the already amazing talent
working on GNOME.

Anyhow, I know this isn't a happy day for anyone, but looking at the
body of work we have now and the hundreds of smart people we have
advancing it, the future is bright. I hope everyone is suitably
excited - if I look at a timeline over the past few years, the pace of
innovation and speed with which we've been catching up to and
occasionally surpassing proprietary desktops is pretty amazing. With
GNOME 2 we'll have a single, genuinely-competitive-with-Microsoft
desktop interface shipping as the default UI for all the interesting
UNIX flavors - that's a big deal. But more than that, with
abstractions such as gnome-vfs, Bonobo, and GConf we're well set up
for the network-centric future and <insert buzzwords here>, not just
fighting past battles.

We have to stay focused on making a better desktop - GNOME 2,
Evolution, GNOME Office - if we do that I have no doubt we'll keep
ratcheting forward. The nice thing about free software is that you can
only add to it, it never goes away, so its forward progress has a kind
of inevitability. Which isn't to say we won't benefit from moving
forward further and faster, so no slacking. ;-)

</pep talk>, I'll go back to GTK hacking and see if we can chill out
the feature creep long enough to ship something useful.

Havoc

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