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Linux Business

Eazel: The Honeymoon's Over 161

Posted by timothy from the say-it-ain't-so dept.
OdinHuntr writes: "Newsforge has an article detailing Eazel's layoff of over 50% of its workforce. Quite a day, eh?" And GrokSoup writes: "According to News.com, Eazel laid off 40 employees today -- or more than half of its staff. The company says it is trying to get its "... burn rate and business plan in line with the more sober economic environment," but we all know what that means. Don't we?" Update: 03/14 03:20 AM by T : And on a slightly more positive note, Dan Gillmor writes: "Hey, I stopped by Eazel today and Andy H showed me a nifty (but as yet unreleased) RSS viewer that's an intelligent icon on the Nautilus desktop ... I posted a screen shot in today's weblog."
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Eazel: The Honeymoon's Over More

Eazel: The Honeymoon's Over

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  • just when you thought it wasn't safe... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    to work for a linux company

    oh wait, everyone is getting laid off. that's open sores for you i guess huh?

  • Interesting (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    By your logic, no open-source company will ever be able to stay in business providing anything to the end user.

  • Re:About that Somber Economic Environment (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you can do it with HP, you're a better man than Carly. Trying to sell "HP Services" that set up and manage networks when HP doesn't even manage its own internal network? Putting $500 eMachines on the desks of newly hired engineers? Selling off the LaserJet division (the only division that's made profit projections in recent years) bit by bit? Forcing everyone to give up their annual raises, cutting staff three months later, and claiming they have nothing to do with each other?

    Let's face it -- Fiorina keeps announcing grandiose service-selling schemes while divesting everything that makes anything. Selling inkjet cartridges won't keep the company afloat.

    The problem isn't keeping expenses down. The problem is selling something that people want to buy. You're not going to sell enough $400 Pavilions to make up for no one hiring HP Network Engineers, not even if you throw in a free $40 Inkjet.

  • You know what they say: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Eazel come and Eazel go!

  • Funny banner ad (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When I cliked on this article the banner ad read:

    "How does "Free Software" make money"

    Seems to me, based on the profits (or should I say lack of same) shown my most of the free software companies, the answer is....

    They don't
  • On the plus side, at least now I don't feel foolish for being a smart guy in the tech industry for ~10 years, and *not* being a multimillionaire.
  • I like your post. I wish we could post it every ten years. Remember Junk Bonds? Those were the high risk gambling of the 80's, Aeronotics were the 60's, Stock Exchanges in General in the 1920's, Gold in the 1850's. (War was the way to make it big in the 1930's and for millenia before before for that matter.)

    Every ten years produces young ambitious people that want to make millions by the time they are 30 and are willing to gamble the rest of their lives for it.

  • This is an excellent article. Whereas the layoffs are sad, sad news (and happening all over), there are reasons to keep plowing ahead.

    Dan Gillmor wrote in his article:

    I've decided to give Linux and Nautilus the acid test. I'm going to load them on a laptop before my next trip and see if I can survive on the road without Windows. Stay tuned.

    We routinely travel all over the world with our Linux-based laptops. We configured them with Gnome and KDE, and they all have StarOffice 5.2. We're thus able to open all the Microsoft Office documents from Linux in case it's necessary.

    Cheers!

    E
  • No, I am not saying that only infrastructure should be Open Sourced. I am saying that infrastructure must be Open Source. There's a big difference, isn't there?

    Yes, Open Sourcing Mozilla was the best thing Netscape could do. Too bad that it took two years to get it working, MS walked away with the browser market on the Windows platform while it was happening. If we can get Linux desktops out there in quantity, maybe we can turn that around now.

    If you think I tend to go with the flow, hit my web site and read my old interviews and papers. It's the same tune today.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • "mares"? I don't remember that one, but I would not be surprised if I removed it. I tried to keep the signal to noise ratio higher than Slashdot.

    Freedom of Speech doesn't mean I have to give you a podium to speak from. There are lots of forums like Slashdot where you can say what you want.

    Bruce

  • Depends on the contract. If you're selling yearly support contracts, the best way to make money is to be certain your users don't call - they've already paid, and that call is an expense. How do you make certain your customers don't need to call? Make the product very good, with lots of help.

    (of course, now the question is, why would they buy a support contract if they're never going to use it, but that's a different issue).
  • One would think releasing a 1.0 product would be cause for celebration rather than a round of layoffs.

    What is going on here?? Five months ago, the world was called Utopia, and now everyone is selling pencils? Come on. Someone else in this thread said something about FUD. I think there's a bit of it going around in this "economic downturn" or whatever the hype-phrase of the week is.

  • Undoubtebly it will go on, if i have to hack it my self.

    What many people seem to forget is that there are 2 things that are important to the development of an open source project.

    One is the amount of people, that number can get very large (like linux kernel, gnome, kde, etc) and then the project can grow a lot, in a short amount of time. The non free-ness of mozilla is costing them some in open source commitment from the communities, but once its 1.0 status, im sure a lot of frustrated hackers will contribute patches

    Second is time. Just about all of the most stable, most used packages in any linux distro's were not made by big companies, nor tons of concurent people, they were made by years of development..

    If nautilus and mozilla were droped by the megacorps today, it might take 1 or 2 years more to get them perfect, but then they would still be the best quality software around .. it just takes time :)



    -- Chris Chabot
    "I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
  • Yes, I've seen Active Desktop. I saw ActiveDesktop in the IE4 previews, dug around, had a play and was upset (for a second) when they removed the ability to put web pages in the task bar.

    This is not HTML, live web pages etc etc. Nautilus allows the icons to be clever. The icons for plain text files contain a snippet of the text. The icons for images are thumbnails. Someone was working on an extension where the icons for fonts would be a small sample of the font. This RSS viewer is actually an extension which renders the icons of RSS/RDF files as the headlines. If you don't want headlines on the desktop, don't put any RSS files there. No HTML pages. No floating windows. Just icons.
  • RSS is a XML-based format for distributing news. The RSS viewer in Nautilus allows the user to have files on the disk (either pointers to the RSS or the actual RSS itself, who knows) and displays the content of the RSS view (i.e. the headlines) _as the icon_. This file can be anywhere, the example screenshot had a folder with 4 files in, and there was another one on the desktop. No Java, no HTML, no worrying about ActiveX controls bashing your machine. This is _nothing_ like ActiveDesktop, which sucked for many reasons.

  • Re:Ha! (Score:1)

    by chill ( 34294 )
    Very recently:

    Lucent - 10% reduction in force
    Cisco - 11% reduction in force

    Both big megas. There are more. You could be next.
  • I was actually refering to how the whole open -source industry does better with the open code. I definitely feel for those that are losing their jobs.

    But lets imagine that a great app called "super-pot" was written under a closed license by a company called "pots-RUS". This program was ideal for business who had lots of pot plants. When "pots-RUS" goes under the code dies:

    -all the users get no more updates, this costs them to change.

    -other support firms (VARS) have to retrain, or worse still lose customers to other VARs who guessed which firm would survive in the "potting mix planner" market.

    -no other firm can come along and say, "you guys where miss managed, do it this way..." and then take over from where "pots-RUS" failed.

    The open source licence protects the comunity (both business and others) who use or support the software.

    If the software is good then the programers could open thier own VAR business and support the program themselves. Once the software has reached a certain level of functionality, complete rewrites are just not that usefull for the customer.

    The only reason the GPL usefull in this situation compared with BSD is that people VARS can happily fix code for "pots-RUS", and know no other compaines is going to come along and release proprietry versions and hence make it harder for them to support.

    Elivs
  • Capitalism is the reason that employee loyalty doesn't exist. Just like companies only care about the bottom line so employees only care about the bottom line. Why should we hold higher ideals when the employers don't?

    There's an old Soviet joke: "As long as they pretend to pay us, we'll pretend to work." It's not Capitalism or Communism, but human nature.

  • For this argument to make sense, Solaris and Win2K would have to be better solutions to the current problem. And in some cases, they are.

    But for the most part, companies are GOING to spend more money on a solution that gives them the benefit of the software quicker and easier. Remember, no one has ever bought software for the software--they bought it for the benefits they can gain from it.

    This then implies that the real business success stories in the Open Source world will actually come from companies able to deliver similar or better functionality in a package that is easy to install, easy to maintain, and provides benefits quicker than another solution. And in the cases where it is a dead heat between the ease and speed of open source solutions and closed source solutions, the winner will be the cheaper of the two. And by negating software costs, open source should win every one of these.

    For those of you poised to argue the ease/speed assertion, how many contract programmers are being hired today at roughly 1.5 to 2 times the cost of hiring someone on full-time? And how many times to they end up sticking around for 2+ years? Companies hire them because it is quick and easy. End of story.
    --

  • Actually, i think, a better title would be "Everyone: The Honeymoon is Over"..

    About the only thing that could hurt the industry more is amazon giving a final death heave... Then the investors would run away, whole companies would collapse at a faster rate than current, thousands of sysadmins will be flipping burgers while a lucky few retain their jobs with a pay cut, and the world regresses to 1950, right before the we blow ourselves up as Gee Dubya Shrubya wonders what the little red button does..

    (The above post is not smiley captioned. Take it with a grain of salt.)
  • This is absolutely true. If you have ever taken a macroeconomics course, you have heard of the term "competitive advantage". That is exactly how companies like Red Hat survive. It is essentially trade. This does not apply to individual, hobbyist computer users, because as a hobbyist you are not trying to make money -- spending a lot of your spare time on a problem does not reduce your income, because that time would not have generated income for you anyway.
  • Well, I just came accross this story [zdnet.com] on ZDNN which related to your doubt about Redhat. And they're one of the lucky guys around, they split their share while it was very high and now they have enough money in the bank and market share. They profit forcast for profitablity of Redhat probably even next quater. As for others - SuSE are doing very well in Europe. Not very well in U.S.
  • And thats a new feature???

    with MS explorer 4 you had it turned on as default long time ago

    KDE had it since KDE 2.1 beta 1 but with a twist: you can put a web page as a desktop wallpaper, or better - ANY GUI application as a wallpaper!

  • So I'm reading Dan Gillmor's comments on Nautilus, and this paragraph strikes me.

    Let's focus on the positive side first. The Linux community has been touting the combination of the OS and Nautilus, a GUI plus Internet services, as a Microsoft killer. That seems presumptuous, to put it mildly.

    Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I'm pretty sure the Linux community at large has never pushed Nautilus as anything more than a gmc replacement. So where did this guy's impression that Nautilus was this big, phenomonal thing come from?
  • As a number of other people have mentioned, this was not a layoff of Nautilus developers. But if they go down (and that's a very big if), the code is way past the bootstrap stage and is certain to remain alive. Compare it to the complexity of the entire GNOME project or the Linux kernel. Nautilus is big but not rocket science, and it's not Mozilla - something that was 2 years away from working and thus didn't attract developers.

    Bruce

  • Deirdre,

    They are an acquisition target, as are a number of other companies we both know well. There are some big boys out there who want to buy Linux expertise in a working company today, rather than build it. That is why Eazel is not laying off the key developers - they know where their value is.

    If I had to guess, I'd say they will end up part of Dell, which already holds substantial equity.

    I don't know much about SiteRock, but can't be surprised that some companies could not make a go of it. I've liquidated a few myself. This is a very difficult game and in the present situation, cash and patience will win.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • You've obviously never purchased a VA box. VA's stuff is much more than just a box that will run Linux. It's a box that will run Linux _wonderfully_. VA's problem was that they made too many assumptions about market growth. Their servers are worth every penny you pay. Lots of speed and reliability. How many hardware distributors do you know that

    a) ship a custom version of RedHat for their hardware
    b) use teflon cabling for their SCSI drives
    c) do extensive QA on their prototypes so they discover minor memory problems on exceptional conditions, so they don't ship such things to their customers

    VA makes a great server product.
  • Isn't that always the way, though? The market seldom behaves rationally.

    I'm invested in two oil companies that have been turning ever-greater record profits for the past eight quarters. They should be trading at CDN$60. It's only recently come up over $40, which isn't much more than they've ever done.

    Why aren't these stocks skyrocketing? Because of the market is fascinated with gambling their investments on long-shot high-tech companies that have never turned a profit and, in all likelihood, never will.

    Thank god the tech market is crashing. Perhaps people will finally gain a freaking clue about *investing* as opposed to *gambling.* Which, in turn, can only help me: I only purchase stocks that have real value behind them...

    --
  • Software companies have a number of levels of support - first line support filters calls and answers the 'turn your PC on' type ones; second line solves the more difficult problems involving some troubleshooting; and third line is often the developers, particularly in smaller companies, who debug the nastiest problems.

    As Red Hat is already a fair size, I would expect it has this sort of structure already, so that Alan Cox et al only get bothered when there's a serious problem that nobody else can debug. They probably also do a lot of new development drive by particular customers, which may count as 'support' in a sense.
  • But if they go down (and that's a very big if), the code is way past the bootstrap stage and is certain to remain alive.

    Oh Bruce, give it a rest. They've never had a viable revenue model -- even their developers know that (and geeks are not the most finance-savvy community).

    The only reason they're still around at all is that they got funding just before it got hard to get.

    I expect they'll go the way of several other companies (like SiteRock formerly CapTech) and pull back on some of the core open source/free software (pick your terminology of choice) stuff they're doing because It Does Not Fulfill The Investor's Requirements For Profit.

    _Deirdre

  • Too many companies think that the way to make it is to go public. What is wrong with a privately held, privately run group? No shareholders to appease, the freedom to do what you feel is really important, the ability to maintain control. Many private companies are often more tight-knit, smaller but very agile. Too many want to jump on the good-ole IPO bnadwagon.

    First, a misconcepton: even private companies have shareholders. Being private does not mean the founders are in control. Quite the contrary, as anyone from Linuxcare could tell you. It all depends on how one financed the startup and what one had to give away in terms of equity to get there.

    Most of the "dot com" strategy in terms of financing was to grow to the point where there was a significant economy of scale.

    One problem: growing a company is very expensive. It's virtually impossible to grow significantly AND turn a profit. You'll note a lot of profitable times come after scaling back. There's good reasons for that.

    So really the IPO bit is about growing to the point where one can make significant profit easier. Sure, it's a gamble. It's often a really bad idea.

    In summary, it's already way too late for Eazel on these matters: they likely already gave away most of the control for VC funding.

    _Deirdre

  • They are an acquisition target, as are a number of other companies we both know well. There are some big boys out there who want to buy Linux expertise in a working company today, rather than build it. That is why Eazel is not laying off the key developers - they know where their value is.

    In order to be a viable acquisition target, the expected added benefits have to exceed the expected added costs. And I don't see that they do in Eazel's case. Or any of several other cases.

    As a friend pointed out after one company laid off people, "well, we'll still get about 70% of the benefit of his work regardless." This is a part of the problem, you see: for a normal coder, a business gets 100% of the benefit of their work. There's a much greater disincentive to keep open source developers if one is paying market rates (especially in Silicon Valley) and only reaping an additional 30% over what one would have gotten without spending a dime.

    So, you see, those coders may be worth, to any acquisition targets, about 30% of what they're being paid. That, plus Eazel's business model wasn't making sense to even people in-house, well the two of those together spell doom and gloom to me. But then I'm a cheery sort.

    _Deirdre

  • Will their software go on? I mean, really?

    I look at the enormous work going into something like Mozilla-- literally dozens of programmers working 24-7 on something like that. Lots of systems, lots of coordination.

    I just have to wonder whether when funding on something like Mozilla or Nautilus gets pulled, does development continue? Does the software go on, realistically?

    W
    -------------------
  • Here's my scenario...

    AOL pulls finding. Mozilla shuts down or becomes volunteer only.

    The focus would shift from the Mozilla "platform" to the Mozilla "browser", starting with Galeon and its brethren.

    There'd probably be enough energy to wrap gecko in a browser shell for each of the major OSs.

    Anything more substantial than that would really shock me.
    -------------------
  • As the other guy said, even privately held companies have shareholders though usually a smaller number of them than a public company. If you need a large influx of cash and don't want to make a public offering you're going to look to a single group for said capital. Often times that group will give you capital if you give them voting stock which means they have a say in how your company is run. You can also get a large influx of capital by offering public common stock, owners of such stock hope you do things to make their investment worth something but they don't get to tell you what to do.
  • You've made two very good points. A Linux bandwagon got started because before Redhat decided to go public no one gave a fuck about Linux. Then they overcompensate by throwing money around like mad. If they had been forced to use the product they were supporting for a week rather than listen to some geeks describe the euphoria they get from writing C code they would have put their money in better business plans.

  • IIRC SuSE is already turning a profit, RedHat (if current trends continue) should be turning a profit by next year. While this isn't the goldrush of last year, and there probably isn't currently room for a lot of large Linux-only players, there is plenty of money to be had.

  • That means keep your day job while developing your next product.

    Hell yes. I am currently getting towards the eventual conclusion of developing a product, and this leads me to think of the one piece of advice I'd give to someone at the start of the road I'm at the end of. Keep your day job. Your employer pays you because you have something they want. Think about this in terms of being a business. You're also going to need an 'in' to various places - your current employer is probably as good a place to start as any other.

    Mind you, I hated my employer at the time :)

    One more thing: This alleged next product - make sure someone with a shedload of money needs it. Like, they cannot live without it quantities of need.

    Enough ranting.
    Dave
  • 20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly). He was right.

    Yeah, Microsoft is just begging for a cash infusion from the Juggernauts that are O'Reilly and RedHat.
  • Good troll. Starts off sounding reasonable and informative, to draw people in, then goes into the heavy flamage. Well done!
  • Of course I'm being facetious. In fact, I can't think of a stupider time to start laying off people. I swung by their website and dl'd the super-duper install program in the hopes of installing Nautilus, but the install program would get only so far into downloading packages and then segfault. Repeatedly. It's not like I'd be able to fix the install program, I couldn't find the sources to it in that maze they call a website.

    `No problem,' I thought. `I can just download the rpm's and install them by hand!' Yeah. Right. I downloaded the rpm's they had listed on the Redhat 7.0 page; the links for some of which were just plain broken and I had to cut and paste from Mozilla and use wget and some editing of the URL's to get the packages.

    This does NOT make for good first impressions.

    That pages also informs me that I should make sure my GNOME is up to date, but I'll be damned if I can get ximian's damned install program to download. (http://go-gnome.com piped through /bin/sh *would* work, i'm sure, if the site weren't seemingly down. I don't blame the Ximian guys, hell who knows why their web server is unavailable.)

    I'm just hoping these guys haven't laid off any of the web developers because they must realize that for a company which writes software mainly available on the WWW, the first thing a user is going to interact with is the web site. It doesn't matter if this application they're writing is going to change computing forever, bring about world peace and exile Bill Gates to the math departpment at Wassamatta U; if the UI of the website is braindead, that's doesn't say much for the applications the website's gatekeeping or or the support they're going to want to sell to the public.

    I thought these people were supposed to be user interface wizards, or something. Quite frankly, I'm not impressed.

    So they have a website which has broken links and an install program which chokes for no apparent reason. (Don't even let me go into the registration system which didn't work.)

    Let me tell you, nothing pisses me off than wasting an afternoon running around in circles.

  • And the little companies that do succeed are going to be the ones that keep their expenses way down until they are profitable, rather than ride the more extravagant venture capital road.

    Wow, you mean like real companies that make products and sell them? As if that would ever work.

  • Sheesh man. People put their lives, their hopes and dreams and fortunes into these companies. They failed because the market is hostile. To most people that doesnt mean much. So I'll put it more clearly: They failed because they cannot sell their product and they can't sell their product because of the GPL. So the question you have to ask yourself is: do I want to exploit people to get my software? Talk about slave labour.
  • Personally, i won't install this thing. Just running Mozilla (Konqueror just segfaults on startup for me) uses most of the free RAM on this 128MB P3-500.

    However, i'd be interested to know how far the developers have got with regard to improving the speed of Nautilus.

    I'm optimistic about Linux as a desktop environment, but we have a long, hard road to travel to get the windowing environment and applications anywhere near the snappiness of Windows.

  • Redhat is following the rule that companies don't pay for software, they pay for solutions. They want someone to come in and set up everything for them so they don't need to think, or hire people to be experts. That's what Redhat does for a living, and they are about to make a profit from it.

    I don't know how Eazel is planning to make money. When Andy H spoke at Monterey last year, I got the distinct impression that he didn't know either. I keep hearing about "subscription services", but no details.

  • What would be even better is if everyone could get beyond the buzz words and marketing hype and talk about the technology for a minute. Active desktop and other such phenomenon (remember pointcast and the castanet push craze?) are usually based on sound concepts which are then implemented poorly. Integrating network access into applications is a great idea -- extending this to fetching recent information over the Internet is very valuable. Doing this as applications that just work as applications, instead of trying to hide their implementation is stupid. What's the difference between an active desktop window showing me the weather and a buttonless browser window showing me the same rdf/xml/html/php page? Nothing. Lets implement xml, rdf, etc. well in browser backend software and then give the user the option of how to be presented with that information.
  • But for the average user, or business, Red Hat is probably the solution for support. That's in the USA.

    Most of the average users or business don't use Red Hat Linux, however. The average users are using Windows, and the average business are using NT or a high-end UNIX. And generally put, when the average person or business decides to deploy a UNIX, they've got people on staff to help them, or in the case of the individual, they can help themselves.

    So no, Red Hat's model won't cut it- they have to beat out users who know what they are doing, newsgroups/mailinglists/IRC channels, and people who have on-staff geeks to fix this kinda thing.

    Oh, and I've been hearing that all of the .coms are "on their way to making a profit" for quite some time now..

  • Yeah, that whole idea that the larger the userbase the more active the development is largely untrue at programs of any complexity.

    It's not like bugs can be fixed in five minutes of work by someone who isn't comfortable with the source- if they were that simple, they probably would have been corrected before leaving.

    JWZ summarized it pretty well when he quit. http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html [jwz.org]

    And being the manager of a small open source project, I can tell you first hand- a very small percentage of the users do 99% of the work. Tough rap, eh?

  • I'm not an MBA either; perhaps that's why I occasionally buy bottled water.

    All your event [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
  • I agree 100 percent. Read my post from several days ago for a personal insight into this.

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/03/08/03292 48&cid=270
  • Active desktop is not defunct, it's just not touted or used much. You can still have a web page sitting on your desktop (nothing like RSS in my opinion). Active Desktop is what makes it possible for users to only have to single click on desktop icons instead of double clicking (yeah, big deal I know, but it saves a click).

    RSS on the other hand appears to be alot less heavy unlike active desktop. Active desktop would slow a machine down if it has a web page on it. This looks like all it's doing is grabbing a jpg and a list of links. Nothing heavy there. While on the desktop you may not want this, but with the rss in Nautilus it looks as if you can store these little snippets in any folder in your home directory. That would be handy.

    as for my other comments on Nautilus, I think there's LOTS Nautilus is doing that has been done and some that hasn't been done before. This is the first time I can remember being able to tag files with those little tags (on Linux anyway). Others may have done what Nautilus is doing, but, to me, Eazel is combining alot of handy features into one app. No one app has ever done as much as Nautilus is doing, IMHO.

  • Man that RSS module will ROCK! I must say, Nautilus 1.0 is MUCH improved over the preview release and speed is good too (128 MB Ram, Pentium II 450 MHz, Permedia 2 with 8 MB and XFree 4.0.1). Now if I could only have the RSS module! :) That looks GREAT! I imagine having the headlines on my desktop all of the time and they be updated as I work during the day! I am using Nautilus right now to post this and I must say NICE JOB! Yeah, there's a lot of stuff some users (read ubergeeks who like crusty stuff) won't like or use, but I LOVE the way Nautilus renders the desktop and the default icons are beautiful! Eazel may just be trimming the chaff away. I did notice it said almsot none of the developers were touched and that's a good thing. Would I be in favor of a Ximian and Eazel merger? Sure. Nautilus is going to be part of Ximian Gnome anyway, so it only makes sense. I can now wave good bye to ugly GMC.
  • I hate replying to myself, but after a bit of time using nautilus as a browser, I noticed one thing that could be handy....a PRINT button! Only way to print a web page is to hit up the launch in Mozilla button an print from there, but it would sure be nice to be able to print direct from Nautilus. Also, can Java appleys be done in Nautilus?? Is there a JRE we have to run??
  • Well, OK, that all makes sense. But what about the end user? Is it possible to run a business which writes open source software for end users? How might they make money? Tech support is not an option, since that would encourage the company to make hard-to-use software. Selling copies of the software is not really an option, since competitors can buy one copy and start selling it themselves. What other options exist?

    ------

  • the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly)

    It's been said before, but... if you make your money off of support, what is your insentive to write interfaces so good that users rarely need help?

    ------

  • I don't speak for Eazel, but as one of the remaining staff members, I don't think this is a fair summation of the morals of Eazel's executives, and it pains me to read it.

    If you ever have the good fortune work with Bud and Andy for a few weeks, you'll know they're some of the most ethical and compassionate people in the computer industry.

    I've been through layoffs at several respected companies, and Eazel's treatment of the remaining staff is the most generous and kind I've ever experienced.

    Would you believe several staff members are even insisting on continuing their work unpaid --- or making Eazel open-source their part of the process so that they'll be be to do so?
  • Microsoft is NOT cheaper.

    I have been an NT 4.0 MCSE for about 3 years at this point.

    I have been working with NT Server 4.0 and Citrix WinFrame/MetaFrame for 3.5 years.

    I have been a Citrix CCA for 1 year.

    I have yet to see an install where the cost of labor (using a consultant) is not at LEAST 25% more than the costs of hardware and software, and with a credible company (I used to work for a fly-by-night MCSP, but it paid well), it is easily double.

    A real NT4 network setup by experts or at least qualified morons used to set a company back $5000 or so for the network design, and actually setting up the PDC/BDC. Want Exchange? Gonna cost you another 1-2 thousand in costs.

    It adds up.

    MCSEs make less than Unix admins, but not by that much. Also, the MCSE is the only easy to use requirement for NT Admins, and the MCSE exams are a joke. The real NT admin knows the resource kit and registry reasonably well, including LOTS of command line tools and scripting. You can get an NT 4.0 MCSE (and I'd assume Win2K, but I don't use Win2K, so no need to recertify) without real knowledge.

    Hence the low reputation of NT Admins.

    It's not that NT Admins are dumb for being NT Admins. I mean, I would say that all things being equal, obtaining an MCSE makes you a bit more knowledgable (even with the damned test-prep books, I used the Resource Kit to learn), I mean, you'll learn something when studying. The problem is that things aren't equal, and unqualified people are becoming MCSEs.

    MSDN, KB, etc., it find for a software developer, and it gets you mostly there. Realistically you need the giant super-duper MSDN package for developers, and I forget the price on it but it isn't that bad. If I want to support my application on Windows NT, I use this option. However, that doesn't help me get it on Linux. To get it on RedHat Linux, time to call RedHat. RedHat Linux IS an important platform these days.

    Solaris is it's own mess. For starters, my admins make another $10K-$20K, and Ultra Sparc hardware is comparitively more expensive than Intel equivalents, sometimes significantly. I would suggest that my $2000-$3000 Linux server that includes mirrored IDE drivers, would require about $5000-$6000 for the equivalent Sun box. Getting Solaris happy on an Intel solution is a nightmare, and I haven't seen anyone selling Intel solutions for Solaris is a LONG time.

    RedHat Linux may often be more expensive than Solaris/Win2K, it is then not the right option. If Solaris is the most cost effective, call up Sun's local rep. If Win2K is the solution, go to the computer store and pick it up or call your local MCSP.

    Pick the most cost effective solution for your business and open up the checkbook. If you're in the Boston area, call Feratech. :)

    Alex

    Microsoft is DAMNED expensive. RedHat is damned expensive. Solaris is expensive. Not RedHat distributions aren't relevant (no corporate stability/marketshare/mindshare, sorry Caldera). Pick you poison, I chose OpenBSD... Although I still have an NT4 Server farm b/c I love Exchange.
  • Yes, become a game company. Sell an online service (monthly/hourly).

    There has NEVER been another company that markets software to home users.

    The entire PC phenomenon involved people being able to share data between home and work. The only things that people really bought were games. Most of their software either came on the PC when they took it home (remember when new computers shipped with Software? Before MS told them that they shouldn't do that), or they borrowed from the office. In a few cases, they buy a copy and give to their friends.

    The entire PC Software market is based upon pirating software for the home market so that you establish a mindshare for the user and sell to the businesses.

    You question, how to I make money developing software that I want to give away for free? My response, it can't be done.

    Shareware CAN work, if you can get the businesses to pay.

    Random tools USED to sell on the PC (disk doubler crap).

    You need to sell a product or server that people will pay for that is greater than your costs.

    Redhat would like that to be support contracts, but they don't have anything too useful. All they have is a dumb phone number/priority FTP server with the box. I haven't seen anything really good from them.

    Also, if you write some really good GPL'd software that is useful, you have at most 3 months to ship it in volume to stores. Then RedHat includes it in their next point release of RedHat.

    Sorry dude, find a real market. The Linux support market will exist, but the Linux software market won't.

    Some other people compared the revenues of Redhat and VA to Microsoft and Oracle and said that it meant that licenses were all the money.

    I would hazard a guess that if you combine ALL the revenue from supporting Microsoft products (all the consultants, integrators, etc), that much more money is made there than in the licenses. I would suggest that the same is true for Oracle.

    The money is in the support contracts. Check with Sun.

    Biggest "support" company? Compaq.

    Whenever I want an NT Server, Compaq gets a call and ships me out my new Proliant. Why? Support. When I call their 800 number at 3 AM, I can get to a tech rep that will check their knowledge base, escalate my call quickly, or ship out a part quickly. There is no comparison.

    You don't sell products, you sell solutions, and solutions are a server, often called support on Slashdot.

    Alex

  • Because of that, a lot of the money is going to be made by old-line companies with a lot of cash and the patience to weather bad economic times, like IBM and (if I can do anything about it) HP.

    Is that why you advised them against Open Sourcing OpenMail [kuro5hin.org] even though it would be a great addition to the repository of Open Source software?

    I agree with your suggestions to them but I would like to hear it from the horse's mouth (so to speak).

  • I don't know about VA, but Red Hat is actually doing OK. They're on track to make a profit this year.

    The point isn't whether RedHat can make a profit or not but whether they were justified in IPOing and fostering expectations as unrealistic as they made early on in their creation. A consulting firm with two friends making websites and balancing the budget can be profitable, it doesn't mean they should IPO and try to become a multimillion dollar corporation.

    Public companies have higher standards than merely turning a profit to justify an investors expenditure. Sizable return on investment (i.e. better than if the investor just stuck the money in the bank) and high potential growth are also factors. No one has yet convinced me that supporting Linux is not a market with low barrier to entry. Dell, Compaq and IBM have already lead the way in showing the folly of thinking a first mover can win out in the Linux hardware world, I wonder who is going to prove RedHat wrong in the software space.

    By paying people to develop software, they have the knowledge in house to provide superior support. Their people don't need to grovel over the code because they wrote it.

    Any company that has developers doing support or being in any way connected to support services deserves to be on Fucked Company [fuckedcompany.com]. Do you think Sun and Microsoft have their kernel programmers answering phones?

    That's in the USA. I imagine that it's Mandrake or SuSe in Europe, TurboLinux in Asia. Red Hat is probably the solution for support. That's in the USA. I imagine that it's Mandrake or SuSe in Europe, TurboLinux in Asia.

    SuSe has had difficulties [slashdot.org]. Turbolinux has had similar problems [slashdot.org]. The fact of the matter is that reality is strongly countering the unbridled optimism that most of the first-mover Linux companies had in the potential commercial viability of support services.

    20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly). He was right.

    How was he right? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Computer Associates, Sun, SAS Institute, etc are making billions in revenue and profit from selling software. Who is making anything remotely close to what the afforementioned companies are doing by selling services?

  • Compared to the price tag the equivelant product from Microsoft or Novell, the price of RedHat's enterprise offerings is peanuts. For example, look at RedHat Linux Enterprise Edition with OpenMail versus Exchange 2000:

    1 server, 25-client licenses for Exchange 2000: $2,374.00 (approx.)
    1 server, 25-client licenses for Exchange 2000 Enterprise Edition: $6,999.00
    RedHat Linux Enterprise Edition with 50-client OpenMail: $2,995.00
    Red Hat Linux 6.2 Lotus Domino Bundle (25 client licenses): $3,699.00
    Groupwise v5.5 25-user: $3,480.00

    Now that's not even the entire story. If you want Exchange 2000, you also need Windows 2000, and the client access licenses for that. If you want Groupwise v5.5, you need to buy either Windows NT 4.0 (and CALs) or Novell Netware 3.11 or later (and user licenses).

    However, it should be noted that the true pricetag of any of these products is not the initial cost of purchasing it, but rather the costs involved in maintaining it. If your servers are constantly down because either the administrator doesn't understand how to fix them or they're just broken by design, that's a whole lot more costly than the initial purchase price.

    Note: The price on the Exchange 2000 server with 25 CALs might be off by about +/- $300 (Microsoft's pricing information on Exchange 2000 seems rather difficult to make sense of -- for example, according to the site, it'd be cheaper to buy Exchange 2000 without CALs and add 5 CALs, than to buy Exchange 2000 with 5 CALs by about $265).

  • This is exactly the case. And fine by me. Who says we need any companies for the end-user? I certainly don't want any. I'm perfectly happy as it is right now, with my Debian. If I were to never see another update during my apt-get dist-upgrade, from now until the time I die, I would die a happy man. After all, it's hard to improve upon perfection. At work however, I don't have the time to mess around with Debian. And if something doesn't work, the mailing lists aren't going to cut it. I need something that JustWorks, even if it's not the most fun, or even the best option. I need someone on the other end of the phone, that I can call whenever I want, to tell me what's wrong. I don't see any reason why VA and RedHat wouldn't make a profit. Sadly however, I don't see how companies like Eazel, and to a lesser extent, Ximian, ever will.
    signature smigmature
  • Ok, I know what you mean about the NT admins, the MCSE stuff (I've a 9 exam MCSE diploma but that was years ago ;)). I however disasgree MS solutions will cost more. The MSDN universal subscription will cost you 2500$ max. for 1 year. But indeed MS tech support is expensive as RH's is. It's however IMHO not possible for RH to put as much information online about the products they support/sell as MS does, simply because they make money selling that INFO. That's a difference.

    But you're one of the first people I see here talking realistically when it comes to Linux and business. Too many times people just do instead of think first: how will it cost me if I do it myself and how much will it cost me if I let somebody else do it for me? (excluding the fun factor). I build the servers here myself but that's because I think it's fun and it's my company and my spare time so who cares ;) but when you think of it: doing it during work ours will cost you loads of money: so call dell and order a few boxes instead. :)

    Plus, with all the costs, it also has to fit in the knowledge people have. My university had only Unix boxes, now I'm a MS only shop, because we specialised in developing technology specific for win32. Switching to another platform will cost us a lot, staying on win32, with all the knowledge we already have, costs us way less.

    Good luck with your business.:)
    --

  • The system Eazel released is in fact active desktop and related tools found in windows9x/win2k, for quite some time now (since IE4.0). Remember Bill Gates when he said "Information at your fingertips"... well that's what he ment. However, are there succesful 'service' providing companies working with Active Desktop or similar services? no. (and that's with an installed base of 90% of the desktop computers in the world). Now, you expect to get a company, that targets its services on 5% or less of the desktop PC's to be succesful? Also when considering that the target groups are used to use FREE software and FREE services online?

    I don't think so.
    --

  • Doesn't it? the TCO will then be as high as say a solaris powered machine instead of a RH powered machine. (or, to feed the greedy troll's mouth: a win2k powered machine instead of a RH machine).

    or even higher.

    So my question is then: why still using RH software even if you have to pay $20,000,- when you get MSDN, KB etc for free with your copy of Win2k server, costing 1200$ or less. Or get Solaris, (75$) and pay for support, from an organisation that is probably still around next year, which is not the same for RH.

    I do understand what you mean by support and it makes perfect sense. However I doubt it that it will still make Linux 'cheaper' (as in costing less money) than alternatives that cost money to get a license, but are cheaper (as in: costing less money) in support.
    --

  • Partnered with Sun...

    Which desperately needs a replacement for CDE, itself a desperate replacment for OpenWindows. Oh well, CDE sucks, but it sucks less than OpenWindows, probably because Sun had less control over CDE. Here's hoping they have even less control over Gnome and Eazel.

    __________________

  • However, are there succesful 'service' providing companies working with Active Desktop or similar services? no.

    Eazel has two advantages over Active Desktop. First, it doesn't try to embed itself in the background. That's actually quite easy to do in X windows, but what use is an app that gets covered up the moment somebody actually starts using the computer?

    Second, the implementation of Active Desktop is horrible. Nobody who plans to get any work done leaves Active Desktop enabled -- it destabilizes the system too much.

    AD, if it worked, would be pretty cool. There are still a fair number of apps available. And even if RDF is beyond you, you can create new ones easily with a little HTML and Javascript. Recently, I went into "what the heck" mode and put a bunch of webcams, satellite trackers, and self-updating weather maps on my Win2K laptop. Thought it would be a fun decoration for my office while I worked on my desktop system. And it would have been, if it didn't hang the system more than once an hour.

    __________________

  • I installed KDE a few days ago and while it's nice nautilus it just miles ahead of konqueror.Huh? I've found Konqueror to be a hell of a lot more robust, able to be accessed anywhere from within KDE, strong graphically and surprisingly stable on even complicated web sites.

    Now if I can only figure out how to set my damn homepage in Konqueror...

  • headtrip? that you?

    t/l 40910

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • I recently got laid off from a tech company, and it is usually obvious from the get-go whether a company is going to succeed or not. For the company I worked for, it was no surprise.
    You make it sound like Eazel are gone. Did you read the article? Eazel got rid of their marketting and testing departments. Concerning? A little, but the developers are still there. Suprising? Not really. What's the point of a marketing department when you don't currently have any services worth selling?
    Eazel is a nice idea, and I was looking forward to trying out 1.0. However, I installed KDE 2.1 yesterday and was very, very impressed. Surely it will be the default in distros to come.
    You realize that Nautilus 1.0 was released today, don't you? If you haven't tried it I don't think you're in any position to compare it to KDE or anything else.
    Nothing dies in the open-source, but GNOME and Eazel probably just died in the Linux-business arena.
    How do you figure that? Plenty of companies have laid of employees. Redhat was one. Are they dead in the "Linux-business" arena?
  • But doesn't this indicate that the "give away software, sell services" business model is not enough for profitability?
    Given that Eazel released the product that enables those services today I think it might be a little early to be judging the profitability of the model. What this particular layoff indicates is that the market is no longer going to give companies unlimited cash and an unlimited timeframe to become profitable.
  • 20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly). He was right.
    Jerry Pournelle's a smart guy. One of my favourite quotes of his: "I knew that I would live to see the first man on the moon. I never dreamed I'd see the last".
  • It's downright unfair and dishonourable to develop a product and a brand identification, and then once the product is out, lay off more than 1/2 the staff that had been necessary for developing it.
    I think you're being a little harsh. Eazel is not some megacorporation. You can be fairly sure that those people who made this decision personally knew almost everyone who was fired (at least if they were in the same office geographically, I don't know how Eazel was organized). They wouldn't have taken this action lightly. Most likely it was a case of firing some of the staff or closing doors completely. Of course if they don't get enough customers (because, say, some of them are boycotting the company) then they'll go under anyway.
    Don't forget it's not just the coding that goes into something like Eazel (and developers were dismissed) but also the product strategy and marketing that must've gone into developing the idea behind something like the Eazal Services that they plan to offer.
    I've never seen any marketing department contribute anything useful to the design or implementation of a product.
    This is why employee loyalty no longer exists, because of stories like this.
    Capitalism is the reason that employee loyalty doesn't exist. Just like companies only care about the bottom line so employees only care about the bottom line. Why should we hold higher ideals when the employers don't?
  • There's an old Soviet joke: "As long as they pretend to pay us, we'll pretend to work." It's not Capitalism or Communism, but human nature.
    Human nature is it alright. People react to how they are treated. Many companies these days treat employees badly. Companies which display loyalty to their employees are fairly rare. Capitalism dictates that the bottom line is the fundamental concern so naturally that dictates company behaviour.

  • Thank you for the news, and good luck on your Nautilus development.

    This is what is really heartening about the Free Software/Open Source movement- People really care about what they are doing.

    It's an extremely valuable (economically, and personally) thing.

    We structure our world capitalistically so that we can channel selfish motives. But the really successful ventures will also channel benelevolence. Thank you.

  • Great News!

    This'll be great for those of us who sell drugs for a living. Now that all these poor dotcom schmucks are getting laid off, they're going to sink into a pit of hopelessness and despair, and resort to chemicals to make them feel temporarily better. The failure of the open-source movement has been a tremendous boon for the crack-selling industry.

    Come on, guys, the party's over here!

  • Well, I can say that I saw this coming [slashdot.org]. I just didn't expect it to be in 12 hours.

    Specifically I'd like to know how they justified their plans for IPOing or spending millions in VC money from peddling GPL software.

    I think that's an excellent question for Netscape shareholders to ask. Eazel, on the other hand, was started as a pure "Eric Raymond says it will work!" play from the begining - everyone who invested in it knew full well what they were getting into.

    What I'd like to know is exactly how people were convinced that these companies could make money? If you work or have worked for one of these companies, please can you explain to me how they planned to make a profit?

    It seems incredible, doesn't it? I think in the case of Eazel, investors were blinded by two things:

    • Linux went from nowhere to a strong server presence so quickly that all the people who had laughed it off - journalists, VC's, IT people - decided not to make the same mistake again. Instead they made the opposite mistake, believing every wildly exaggerated claim of market share and usability from the Linux zealots.
    • I think investors actually believed all the hype from the "Until now, Linux users were limited to a cryptic command-line interface" campaign that Red Hat and Gnome pushed so eagerly, and thought Nautilus would be much more of an advance over existing interfaces than was the case. Some of the KDE developers were saying after last summer's Linux World Expo that a marketing director from Eazel had come to their booth, seen a Konqueror beta and been stunned. He obviously had no idea that such a thing existed already, let alone that this was the 2.0 release coming out.
    • This overlaps with the first two but -- you get the impression that if these investors had bothered to actually install a Linux distro and use it full-time for a week themselves they would have placed their money a lot more wisely.

    You know, I feel bad for VA. They're running what could have grown to a nice medium-size company, and I think the worst thing that happened to them was that huge run-up in their stock price. That put them in a position where they couldn't help but disappoint. Eazel, on the other hand, I've never really liked. Nautilus is OK, if slow (although I haven't tried 1.0 yet) but it's only a file browser. And one that's basically a knockoff of Explorer, with bits of Konqueror and the Mac Finder thrown in and a couple of their own useless innovations (embedded MP3 playing). they were relying entirely on hype and the same sort of exaggeration of the novelty of their work that turned me off to the Gnome leadership.

    Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

  • Hey, nice troll, man! 138mb of memory, eh? You wouldn't happen to be taking the 6 or 7 threads it launches (each of which shows up as taking about 25 mb or so) and then adding them all up to come up with this number, would you? Because if so, you'd be wrong. Read up on Unix/Linux memory usage sometime - nautilus isn't taking 6x25Mb of memory - it's taking 25 megs, but each thread is displayed as using that same 25mb in "top".
  • The article says very few developers were laid off; business and marketing departments suffered the largest cuts. I don't see how this is news -- the economy is in a minor depression obviously, eventually companies will be able to expand their staff.

    Regardless, this is one of the major virtues of Open Source Software. If Eazel Inc. dies like the Maximum Linux [maximumlinux.com] magazine did, users of the software will most likely start an organization of former users who continue to develop Eazel. This is exactly what the Maximum Linux readers did -- formed Maximum Linux.org [maximumlinux.org], to help support the community that would have else vanished.

  • "H-h-hey, Mister? I'd like to buy one sandwich and one cup of soup. Oh, and if it's all right, can I have four plates and bowls so that I can split it up with my wife and kids?"

    "You got it, pal. That'll be $4.50."

    *fumbling with floppy disks* "Well, umm, I'm a bit low on cash, but I've got lots of code under the GPL!"

    *blank stare*

    "Please, my family hasn't eaten for three days now!"

    "Sir, would you and your family please exit the premises." *watches code-jockey leave, one finger on the silent alarm* "Next?"

  • I see another problem that is arising in all this economic turmoil. Too many companies think that the way to make it is to go public. What is wrong with a privately held, privately run group? No shareholders to appease, the freedom to do what you feel is really important, the ability to maintain control. Many private companies are often more tight-knit, smaller but very agile. Too many want to jump on the good-ole IPO bnadwagon.

    Staying afloat often means staying smart, staying quick - and keeping in mind your end vision. Perhaps in Easel's case, the sacrifices couldn't outweigh the dangers, so they simply had to "adjust", for lack of a better term?

    Just my thoughts, take them or leave them.

  • I advised them to not Open Source OpenMail until we were ready to throw it away. I want HP to produce lots of Free Software, but that means they have to make some money, too, or they will make no free software at all. I thought there was still more potential to make money with OpenMail as a proprietary product, and that we could do better things for the Free Software community with the money. That did not work out.

    There is one real philosophical difference between RMS and me. RMS believes that all software should be free. I want to see Free Software and proprietary software compete on a fair playing field, and there are some areas where I insist on software being free, like the infrastructure that everybody uses. So, having a proprietary product is not anathema to me.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Shakeout (Score:3)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:13PM (#365439) Homepage Journal
    This is something to take at face value. Most of us knew that there was going to be a shakeout. Those remaining will be the ones offering real value -- possibly through consolidation. In fact, the Linux companies that can offer end-to-end solutions will do well.

    I can easily see Eazel and Ximian merging -- their business plans overlap in so many areas that it just makes sense. There's even some overlap with Red Hat (cf. their new services network).

    This isn't the end for Linux. It's the end of the hype. We'll live through it.
    --

  • Open Source Model and profits (Score:3)

    by ACK!! ( 10229 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @07:51PM (#365440) Journal
    1. Make a product a lot of people want and put it out for free on the web.
    2. Package the same product in an easily installable format with loads of docs and a support plan.
    3. Give great support.
    4. Put together a serious training program and peddle it hard.
    5. Make your corporate support a subscribition or contract program to ensure future cash flow and to show future investors that you have a future.
    6. Keep overhead low. Cheap digs simple easy-to-navigate site and few employees full-time.
    a) A couple of programmers.
    b) A small but solid support staff.
    c) A couple of trainers.
    d) A syadmin/network admin guy with a junior.
    e) Office Manager and a receptionist.
    f) A small sales staff.
    g) A leader with lots of charisma and the willingness to close the sale.
    7. Design your program for the corporate backoffice aspects staying away from the dead e-commerce buzzwords for now.
    8. Sell to your firms and then re-sale when necessary but don't base your profits from milking off of existing customers, keep selling. A year wihout new clients is a dead, wasted year.

    I worked for a great small firm that designed closed software for lawyers (some of the pickiest customers ever).

    They had one leader, no sysadmin/network guy (the lead programmers filled dual task), Office Manager, Receptionist, Support Manager/Corporate Trainer, two support people/part-time Q&A, 3 programmers, and one Q&A guy full-time. They made money. They have remained solvent.

    The big rule. Don't get a big head. Don't expand too quick but keep a keen eye on improvement and natural expansion. Know your customers, what they want and what they need. Give it to them.

    It is tough. Look at your self as a small business owner before you start seeing yourself as the next big thing. I have never seen my niche. That point where I felt I had an idea to sell where I felt comfortable enough to start my own company. I have seen a small software company survive without insane IPOs and huge falls.

    It can be done.

  • Now if I can only figure out how to set my damn homepage in Konqueror...

    Since Konqueror is a multi-use viewer, it has multiple homepages (called Profiles). When launched as a http navigator, it's in the profile "Web Browsing". You can change the homepage by clicking on Window, and then "Save View Profile 'Web Browsing'".

    When launched as a file browser, it's in "File Management" Profile, and you can change that hame page as well, the same way. I've added the linked term window to my standard File Management profile, so I always have a full command line available in whatever directory I am graphically browsing ("rm *.o" is far easier than clicking and hitting delete on each).

    Since you can add as many Profiles as you want, you can open up your Bookmarks in a left hand side frame, link it to your right window, and broswe that way as well. I have that saved as "Opera Style". One nifty thing is that this also saves the size of the window, so I have a link on my toolbar for a small browser (for looking up things on php.net for instance) and another as a full screen browser (well, one of the two screens I run on).

    --
    Evan

  • Not worried at all. (Score:3)

    by Zapdos ( 70654 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:58PM (#365442)
    Partnered with Sun, Redhat, and Dell.. I am surprised they kept a sales force this long. With these they are going to get their product to 80% of the market. They are now going to be waiting for the product to start shipping. After and only after it starts shipping will there be endusers to buy services.

  • Learn to read the memory output ... (Score:3)

    by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Wednesday March 14, 2001 @05:27AM (#365443)

    Too bad they can't trim 50% off of Nautilus' memory footprint. For being a file manager, it's pretty pathetic to be grabbing 138 megs of system memory just to sit there.

    I guess you're one of those people who thinks that X uses 200MB+? Reading the output of top or ps isn't going to tell you how much memory the process is using - it merely tells you how much is mapped. The problem is that two or more threads may have mapped the same memory area several times, making it look like an 800lb gorilla rather than a marmot. For example, Mozilla has around 20-30 threads active all the time. Chances are pretty good that all you are seeing is the same memory used by multiple threads in Nautilus as well.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • Yes Microsoft was a huge corporate juggernaut in it's first 5 years too. It was started with billions of dollars and all Bill had to do was sit there. If either O'Reilly or RedHat reach 25 years (and I can see O'Reilly doing it) then they won't exactly be short of money either.

  • Re:Some strategy (for us...) (Score:3)

    by influensa ( 267570 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @07:08PM (#365445) Homepage
    I never thought I'd consider this, but I think I'm going to boycott Eazel.

    I'm not going to get militant about it, aside from this post on /. I'm probably not going to do much more than just not use Nautilus specifically to avoid using the Eazel services.

    It's downright unfair and dishonourable to develop a product and a brand identification, and then once the product is out, lay off more than 1/2 the staff that had been necessary for developing it. Don't forget it's not just the coding that goes into something like Eazel (and developers were dismissed) but also the product strategy and marketing that must've gone into developing the idea behind something like the Eazal Services that they plan to offer.

    This way of thinking is exploitative of workers (coders are workers too) and perhaps I was naive thinking that an open source company would be above this. I guess this happens all the time, at open source companies too, and this is just the eye-openner for me.

    But to make a 1.0 release of a much anticipated product (would it have been anticipated w/o the efforts of the marketing types released?) and that very day and then turn around and fire half your staff is not the behaviour of a company that I think deserves my patronage, free product or not.

    This is why employee loyalty no longer exists, because of stories like this.

  • New Linux slogan (Score:3)

    by l-crowe ( 322408 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:21PM (#365446)

    "Where do you want to cash your unemployment check today?"

  • consulting, not startups (Score:3)

    by janpod66 ( 323734 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:53PM (#365447)
    I think the right business model for free software is consulting and contracting, not startups.

    Consultants and contractors are directly paid to do a good job. They have a reputation to protect in their line of work. They are professionals that are in it for the long run because it's their own career. Because they are in it for the long run, they have an interest in doing the right thing, cleaning things up, and maintaining things.

    Startups are a kind of hit-and-run business: investors want to get high returns on investment by any means, and if that can be done over a six months by hyping and without delivering quality, that's just fine with them. Much of the technologies that startups are based on (and busily patenting) wasn't even financed by the investors but by research grants (unfair as it seems, it may still be a good deal for society, since a lot of that comes back in taxes if the company succeeds).

    So, no, I don't see much of a future in open source software startup companies. After those companies have extracted the excess value that free software has, they have nowhere to go, and I don't think in a startup climate they create the right kinds of long-term foundations for themselves to prosper. But I see a bright future in open source software consulting, contracting, and teaching.

    Don't cry for the people at Eazel or Ximian or whatever, though. They are bright, they knew what they were getting into. If their companies fail, they didn't lose, they just didn't win big. They'll get by just fine as consultants or back in the fold at a big company.

  • 50% of what? (Score:4)

    by Angst Badger ( 8636 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @07:57PM (#365448)
    "Newsforge has an article detailing Eazel's layoff of over 50% of its workforce.

    Too bad they can't trim 50% off of Nautilus' memory footprint. For being a file manager, it's pretty pathetic to be grabbing 138 megs of system memory just to sit there.

    --

  • economic reality and GNU (Score:4)

    by Elivs ( 43960 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:24PM (#365449)
    With the stupid levels of development capital that was around the last few years many compaines (eg MS) got alot of money in the bank. Others grew, then lost it all.

    Now that money has gone GNU also did well out of the boom.

    We got lots of code under the GPL !!!

    This is as good or better than a wad of cash in the bank. The shrinking and loss of these opensource firms is not so bad as it is for other groups. Normally when a frim shrinks or goes under the code stagnaties or dies. The GNU licence on the code is an asset for the community to weather the downturn and for other developers to use when times are lean. Elivs PS- I'd still like the open source firms to prosper, but with the GPL its no where near as important for the future of opensource.

  • Irrational Pessimism (Score:4)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @07:21PM (#365450) Journal
    A few years ago the chairman of the federal reserve muttered comments about "irrational exuburence".

    An awful lot of the economy is in fact based on the attitudes of the public at large. Are they confident in the future, or are they victimised by FUD?

    An awfull lot of what has happened over the past 6 months in terms of layoffs is part of the internet bubble shakeout. BUT a lot of it is not.

    Alot of it is based on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Certain national politicians have muttered phrases generating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They have down this to cover themselves in case they mess up, and to sell their own agendas.

    But what this has led to is a self fulfilling prophecy. Because part of what leads to a downturn is fear, uncertainty, and doubt, especially when there are not other factors changing the market, such as a new technology, etc.

    You can call it an irrational pessimism, which is what I have seen in some posts here. I swear, you would think that people would have learned to recognize FUD when they see it.

  • A lot of us went into business with very high expectations, and yes, that was because of how high Netscape went on its IPO, etc. Those expectations are very different now.

    Fortunately, unlike most software businesses: if Eazel doesn't make it, their software will go on.

    There is a lot of money to be made in Linux and Free Software. But that does not change the fact that being a start-up now really sucks. Because of that, a lot of the money is going to be made by old-line companies with a lot of cash and the patience to weather bad economic times, like IBM and (if I can do anything about it) HP. And the little companies that do succeed are going to be the ones that keep their expenses way down until they are profitable, rather than ride the more extravagant venture capital road. That means keep your day job while developing your next product.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • I don't know about VA, but Red Hat is actually doing OK. They're on track to make a profit this year. By paying people to develop software, they have the knowledge in house to provide superior support. Their people don't need to grovel over the code because they wrote it. Now, most of the people who post here probably don't need tech support, we do it ourselves. But for the average user, or business, Red Hat is probably the solution for support. That's in the USA. I imagine that it's Mandrake or SuSe in Europe, TurboLinux in Asia.

    20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly). He was right.

  • Does anyone here actually understand support? (Score:5)

    by alexhmit01 ( 104757 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @08:01PM (#365453)
    Support is not a 900 number to call for technical support. Support is not for end users. End users buy a pretty little box with Wizards when they want "support". Support refers to business support.

    What does this entail?

    I'm developing a UNIX application aimed for Enterprise clients. I know that one of the platforms that I want to support includes Redhat Linux. I could count on my programmers spare time knowledge of Linux, but then it costs me a fortune in lost time if there is a problem. As a result, I pay them $20,000 for their special documentation which includes known bugs, etc., and a live number to talk to one of their kernel hackers to find out the problem.

    Next scenario, I decide to migrate my expensive, but aging, HP-UX system to a modern, inexpensive system. I see that VA Linux will sell me a server for about the same price as Dell. VA Linux, however, will send out a technician (who as access to their knowledge base) and migrate my system for $6,000 including server. Otherwise, I risk losing my system for a few days while they iron out bugs.

    Final scenario, I have 15 servers up and running, with a sysadmin that manages them including server side support for my IT guys. My IT team is writing software to improve our core business. However, they need DB support, etc. My sysadmin, however, spends 4 hours/day reading Slashdot/following bug news, applying patches, etc. That means that half his day is spent not aiding my core business.

    As a solution? I could get another Sysadmin ($80k/year), or I pay Redhat $1000/server/year and they provide me with their enterprise system. Each of my servers are setup in their system, and all updates/bug fixes are automatically applied. I pay them $15,000, and I save the $40,000 of half a sysadmin.

    That's support.

    As a hobbyist, I don't mind spending 15 hours playing with my system until it's right. As a consultant, if I spend 15 hours on a problem, my company lost the ability to make $1500, and if a $500 or $1000 solution solves it? Well, we'll open the checkbook.

    Alex
  • I have always puzzled over the business plans of companies like VA Linux, RedHat, Eazel, Ximian and the like that plan to make money of selling comodity software. Specifically I'd like to know how they justified their plans for IPOing or spending millions in VC money from peddling GPL software.

    I'm not an MBA but it is painfully obvious to me that GPLed software is unfavorable towards reaping rich financial rewards. Take software for instance. Lets say RedHat spends $1 million on paying kernel hackers and writing GPLed software and plans to make up for this in support. The fact of the matter is since RedHat's software is free of licensing costs and is GPLed, anyone can create a value added service from their software and spend less than they do but provide better support and/or extensions to their software by working off what RedHat has already done without having to invest the same amount of money.

    The same is true of hardware. VA Linux thought it could become big time selling Linux servers but failed to realize that anyone can put together a Linux box and sell it. Once Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc decided to invest their considerable experience, market knowledge and distribution chains into the Linux server market it simply became who could afford to spend the most to make the most (just like Walmart vs. your local grocery store).

    What I'd like to know is exactly how people were convinced that these companies could make money? If you work or have worked for one of these companies, please can you explain to me how they planned to make a profit?

    PS: I am pro-Open Source and have worked on Free Software and plan to give away a considerable amount of software (20,000 code application in a few months) but I can't see the sense in believing that Open Source translates into corporate profits unless you plan to use Open Source products as a hook to selling your actual product (e.g. IBM).

  • Just in case people take this wrong, it really was a hard situation. It wasn't really like "good job, you've finished 1.0 and now you are expendable". Things are really cranky in the market. In my case it was probably because I'm part-time and it was more important to hang onto full-time engineers. It hurts of course, but situations can be really hard.

    Also, in a way Eazel showed that Nautilus development is its core. Most of the cuts happened in areas other than Nautilus development. A few of the people at the VP have turned their salaries off, etc. Things are really tight, but for the sake of GNOME and Linux on the desktop I honestly still hope Eazel will pull through (and of course, I will continue to work on Nautilus).

    Here's to better days :-/

    -Seth

  • what it really means (Score:5)

    by unformed ( 225214 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @06:06PM (#365456)
    "... burn rate and business plan in line with the more sober economic environment," but we all know what that means. Don't we?"

    yep, gotta start drug testing.....and that's why they had to lay off half the workforce

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