Eazel was an American software company operating from 1999 to 2001 in Palo Alto and then Mountain View, California. The company's flagship product is the Nautilus file manager for the GNOME desktop environment on Linux, which was immediately adopted and maintained by the free software movement. As the core of Eazel's business model, it is an early example of cloud storage services in the form of personal file storage, transparently and portably stored on the Internet.
History
Eazel was founded by Andy Hertzfeld in August 1999 in Mountain View, California. It had 22 initial employees and raised from several venture capital investment companies.
The company grew from 22 employees in 1999
Staff consisted of former employees of many technology companies such as Apple, Netscape, Be Inc., Linuxcare, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Mike Boich was CEO, having been a major figure at Apple and co-founder of Radius; Bud Tribble was VP of Engineering, having been software manager and a designer of the original Macintosh project; Andy Hertzfeld was a principal designer, having been a lead software engineer and a designer of the original Macintosh project; Darin Adler led development, having been the technical lead for System 7 for the Macintosh; and Susan Kare designed new vector graphics-based iconography, having designed the original Macintosh icons. Other staff included programmer Maciej Stachowiak, who was a programmer and board member for GNOME; and board member Michael Homer, formerly of Apple, AOL, and Netscape. In developing Nautilus, the company addressed several challenges, including building complex user-facing software across multiple Linux distributions, integrating with the existing GNOME open-source community, and operating within a relatively small market for Linux desktop users. It also explored ways to generate revenue from free software by offering related services to customers.
Eazel focused on GNOME rather than KDE, partly due to concerns at the time regarding the licensing of the Qt toolkit on which KDE was based.