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| Interview
with Bart Decrem by Jurgen Dumont
BLSS-team |
07/20/2000
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| -About Bart Decrem |
| Can you tell us more about yourself?
When did you learn to know Linux? What is your story about
moving to the states and now working for Eazel? What is
your part in Nautilus and Eazel? |
| I was born and raised in Belgium,
in the Flemish outskirts of Brussels (in Schepdaal, about
20 miles West of Brussels, to be precise), and moved to
California to attend Law school at Stanford. California
really grew on me (it's pretty nice out here:) and by
the time I finished law school, I had started a non-profit
computer training center in East Palo Alto, a low-income
community located just a few miles from the heart of Silicon
Valley. East Palo Alto was the murder capital of the United
States at that time and I was really struck by how close
we were to Silicon Valley, but how wide the gap was. So
I spent 5 years building an organization called Plugged
In (www.pluggedin.org), that's trying to bridge the technological
gap between East Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, and the
program became a model for making sure that low-income
people not be left behind in the information revolution.
In January of '99, I was ready to move
on to something new, and I sat down with Andy Hertzfeld,
who was one of Plugged In's biggest contributors. Andy
had dedicated his life to making computers easier to
use and when he told me about his vision for helping
to make Linux easier to use, I got really excited. I'd
spent years watching working class people struggle with
computers: they'd spend hours typing in a document,
and then they would save it in the wrong place, never
to find it again. So I was convinced that computers
were way too complicated to use, and I also got really
excited about the idea of open source, and being part
of a movement that was trying to build an alternative
computing environment that wouldn't be dominated by
any one company. So I got to work on putting together
a business plan that would let us build a company based
on developing free software. Mike Boich joined the conversation,
and the three of us spent 3 months figuring out the
business we wanted to build and, in September of '99,
we created Eazel. I helped out with a really broad range
of things, from writing the business plan to ordering
the furniture, and hiring people. Since June, I've worked
as an advisor to the company and I have focused primarily
on coordinating the work on the GNOME Foundation.
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| What is your part in GNOME and the
GNOME foundation? |
| I've spent a fair amount of time working
with the GNOME community, building relationships with
the community, and recruiting GNOME hackers to join Eazel.
Most recently, I've played a coordinating role for the
GNOME Foundation, figuring out a governance model for
GNOME that would maintain control with the hundreds of
hackers who have brought GNOME this far, while also providing
a way for companies to get involved with GNOME. So far,
it looks like we're on the right track. |
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| -About Nautilus |
| I can't wait to use Nautilus as file-manager
for GNOME. I found that GNOME has a shortcoming to KDE
when it comes to file-managing. I believe that Nautilus
can make the difference, it's what GNOME deserves. Can
you tell us what the main advantage will be about Nautilus?
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| One of my favorite features in Nautilus
is the Music View and, generally, custom views. The program
can look at the data in a directory and from that, figure
out the most appropriate way to present that information.
So if you have a directory with MP3, you can view those
as music, and they'll look the way they do in an MP3 player.
It also has audio preview: if you scroll over a music
file, it plays a preview of that file. Nautilus also does
a good job integration the Mozilla rendering engine, so
you'll be able to use it as a web browser that's more
light-weight than Mozilla itself. And of course the integration
with services will be one of the big advantages. For example,
we're offering WebDAV based web-storage that's integrated
within Nautilus, so you'll be able to store your files
on the Net, and that's fully integrated into Nautilus.
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| Eazel's mission is to make Linux easier
to use than any other operating system. The company is
developing Nautilus, an innovative file manager which
serves as the starting point for Eazel's comprehensive
system management solution. This desktop application is
not only designed to be a major step forward in the ease
of use for Linux, but will also lead the next generation
of innovation on the desktop by integrating local file
management with Internet-based services. Will the power
of Nautilus be the internet-based services or will Nautilus
be also a powerful tool without these services? |
| Nautilus will work great without our
services, but we do believe that the power of the Internet
is what's really going to allow us to bring ease of use
to the next level. By combining the graphical user interface
with intelligent network services, we can start helping
people solve all the little things that go wrong with
their computer, and kind of provide the guy with the ponytail
who you call to fix your computer, over the wire. So in
the beginning it'll be pretty standard stuff: backing
up your data over the Net, installing new software, but
over time we can really help people to keep their computer
working properly. |
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| The real test of Eazel's creativity
will be its ability to earn money from a product that
it offers for free. Was this just a good idea or did you
invest and find out that there was a market for it? |
| We spent a fair amount of time agonizing
about the GPL and trying to find ways that we make money
off the software, but came to realize that the GPL was
really the key to the success of Linux, and that we had
to be fully committed to the open source way of doing
things. But we believe that, if we can offer people web-based
services that are going to help them use their computer
more effectively, people will be willing to pay for that
service. Obviously, we did some market research, but at
the end of the day, we took a leap of faith and came to
believe that open source and Linux are really disruptive
developments in the same way that the Internet was disruptive.
And so we fundamentally believe that open source is not
just the way the computing infrastructure *should* be
organized, but it's also the more efficient way of doing
things, and so it's how things *will* be done. So we know
that ultimately tens of millions of people will be using
open source operating systems on their desktop, and if
we can provide those folks with a better computing experience,
we'll be able to build a successful business. |
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| Why is GNOME chosen as the environment
for Nautilus? |
| Andy Hertzfeld looked at both GNOME and
KDE, and had more of an affinity for the way the GNOME
community worked. All of us took an immediate liking to
Miguel De Icaza, Federico Pena-Quintero, Havoc Pennington,
and the rest of the GNOME leaders, and that was a big
part of why we chose GNOME: we related to it very quickly.
We also believe there are some GNOME technologies that
are more promising than KDE technologies. Finally, Andy
was very concerned about the licensing issues around Qt:
he became a firm believer in the GPL and wanted to be
part of an effort that was fully committed to Free software.
But we have a lot of respect for what the KDE people are
doing, and we are trying to help build bridges between
the two environments so that end-users will be able to
use the best applications from both worlds, and so that
the best technologies will be more broadly adopted. |
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| Why Nautilus as product-name? |
| After we created the company, we started
building our software from scratch. But when we introduced
ourselves to the GNOME community, we found out that there
was already an effort to build a new file manager for
GNOME that was code-named Nautilus. So we dropped what
we were doing and starting building on top of Nautilus
instead. I think the name refers to the fact that a nautilus
is a shell, and we're building a graphical shell. Also,
the word evokes the word navigation, which is part of
what we're offering. |
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| How do you feel about the KDE? Sometimes
it seems that there is a little war between GNOME and
KDE. Is it like that or is there some kind of cooperation
between both It seems better to me that both fight Microsoft
and not each other. |
| As I mentioned before, I think the KDE
guys are doing great work, and in some ways KDE is still
ahead of GNOME. There are many times when I feel frustrated
that there are these two different efforts out there,
and I wish we would all work together on a common desktop
platform. But on the positive side, the friendly competition
between the two projects has led to more rapid innovation:
I'm not sure the TrollTech guys would have moved so far
on the Qt licensing issues without the pressure that came
from GNOME, and I think the competitive energy between
the two projects pushes us to move as quickly as possible,
and to the best possible job |
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| KDE 2.0 should be publically available
by Monday 16 October 2000. When can we expect Nautilus
(and gnome 2.0)? |
| We're going to ship a second preview
release of Nautilus over the next few weeks. PR2 will
include services as well and should be like a solid beta
version of Nautilus. Before the end of the year, GNOME
1.4 will be released, which will include Nautilus. GNOME
2.0 is still a ways off, but 1.4 should be a strong product. |
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| -And… |
| What?s your favourite Linux distribution? |
| I use Red Hat. I feel very positive of
the leadership that Red Hat has shown in the Linux community,
their commitment to open source, and the way they help
jump start GNOME. |
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| What do you think about LinuxBelgiuim.net?
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| It's exciting to see how popular Linux
is becoming in Europe, and especially in Belgium, and
I think sites like LinuxBelgium.net are a key part of
that - so I love it! |
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| Op 15 mei
2001 heeft Eazel de boeken moeten neerleggen. Het project
Nautilus wordt welliswaar doorgezet door vrijwilligers:
http://nautilus.eazel.com/ |
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