Eazel

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Eazel was a software company based in Mountain View, California from 1999 to 2001. The enterprise was staffed with former employees of Apple Computer, Netscape, Be, Linuxcare, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, among others. Mike Boich was CEO; Bud Tribble was VP of Engineering; Andy Hertzfeld was a principal designer and Darin Adler led development. Even Susan Kare, author of the original Macintosh icons, was brought in to design new vectorized iconography.

Eazel's main achievement was the new Nautilus file manager for the GNOME desktop environment on the GNU/Linux operating system. Its business plan involved monetizing online services to be offered through Nautilus such as storage, but it failed to do so before venture capital ran out. On March 13, 2001, Eazel released Nautilus 1.0 and laid off most of its employees. It attempted to sell its core development group but went out of business in May 2001. The Nautilus file manager has continued to be updated by the open source community.