Ten-year timeline, part 2: the bubble days

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Last week, we began a multi-part series looking at the soon-to-be ten years of LWN. At the end of that episode, we were coming to the realization that the training business was, perhaps, not going to perform quite as well as our spreadsheets had suggested it might. It turns out that spreadsheets created with free software can be just as deceptive as those done with proprietary programs - who would have ever guessed? So we decided to look into whether it might be possible to make some sort of deal with some other company - preferably one with some money - to keep the show going.

Just how one might go about looking for such a deal is not immediately obvious - especially if you're a bunch of technical people who have no clue about how corporate acquisitions are done. Somehow, hanging an "Acquire Us!" sign on the front page did not quite seem like the right way to go. After some thought, we decided that the best approach might be to just quietly slip the word to a few people that we might be open to offers, then sit back and see what happened. As it turned out, that was all we needed to do. Much of the following story has never been told - but all of the non-disclosure agreements have run out by now, so this seems like the right time.

Meanwhile, things were happening at a furious pace in the Linux community.

• August 26, 1999: Red Hat and Caldera get around to year-2000 compliance. The 2.3.15 patch is "huge", touching all of 600 files (2.6.24 currently has changes to over 10,000 files). The first Ottawa Linux Symposium concludes.

• September 2, 1999: Sun buys StarDivision, but uses its "community source license" for the code. Red Hat shuts down "Red Hat Linux" vendors on Amazon.

• September 9, 1999: SCO (old SCO, mind you, not the current company) trashes Linux in Europe. Bruce Perens worries that Sun may be trying to grab control of the Linux desktop through its acquisition of StarDivision. Disruptive changes in the "stable" 2.2 kernel upset users.

• September 16, 1999: the 2.3 kernel goes into "feature freeze," with Linus predicting a release by the end of the year. He neglected to specify which year, though. Cobalt networks files to go public. LinuxOne - a company nobody had ever heard of - files to go public. Andover.net (the company which had bought Slashdot) files to go public. The first ext3 filesystem patches are released.

The 2.3 feature freeze is instructive - 2.4.0 was not released until January, 2001 - 16 months after this "freeze" went into effect. Over the next months we'll see plenty of reasons for the delay in the 2.4.0 release; Linus was famously not a great release manager. But releases which failed to arrive were the norm back in those days. Free software was much like proprietary software in that regard. One has to look back to realize just how much better we have gotten at getting software releases out in a reasonable period of time.

The IPO filings were beginning to pile up - much to your editor's chagrin. Actually reading those things is a painful chore, and we felt that we needed to examine all of them. The relative newcomers out there may be wondering who that LinuxOne company is. So were we, at the time. LinuxOne materialized out of thin air, slapped its name onto a copy of Red Hat Linux, and called itself a Linux company. They clearly hoped to get in on the general mania and make a bunch of money before people caught on - they nearly achieved it, too.

• September 30, 1999: Caldera spinoff Lineo gets going - remember Embedix and Embrowser? Red Hat drops LWN news from its web site.

Lineo got spun out of Caldera for a couple of apparent reasons: (1) to isolate the DR-DOS lawsuit which was being pursued against Microsoft, and (2) to try to double the number of public offerings. The first objective was achieved, and the suit was ultimately successful. In the end, though, Lineo still failed to get off the ground.

• October 7, 1999: Sun announces that it will be releasing the Solaris source code. The OpenBSD project grabs the last freely-licensed version of ssh and starts the OpenSSH project.

• October 14, 1999: TurboLinux gets a big chunk of venture money. SCO (old SCO) buys a chunk of the Linux Mall. Crypto export rules in the U.S. begin to soften. The devfs discussion continues. SGI, VA Linux, and O'Reilly launch a commercialized version of the Debian distribution. VA Linux files for its IPO.

Old-timers will remember the Linux Mall - that was the place, once upon a time, where we bought our Linux CDs (and stuffed penguins too). Yes, we actually bought Linux on CD and waited for it to show up via mail, though it may seem a little strange now. The Linux Mall, and its founder Mark Bolzern, were fixtures in the early days of Linux. As Linux grew and bandwidth increased, though, the Linux Mall was having a bit of a hard time of it. The name was famous, though, and the site got a lot of traffic, so companies interested in getting into the Linux hype were interested in it.

It may be getting a bit ahead of the story, but this is as good a place as any to let it be known that one of the things that the Linux Mall wanted to do with its new-found wealth was to acquire a media outlet like LWN. It was part of the bigger plan of creating a full-featured e-commerce "mall" centered around Linux. We considered the offer long and hard, but, in the end, declined it. Just as well: the Linux Mall missed the IPO boat and got folded into EBIZ, which, in turn, eventually went bankrupt. Had we taken that path, there would be no LWN now.

• October 21, 1999: LinuxToday is acquired by Internet.com; co-founder Dave Whitinger leaves the building. ATI announces that it will be releasing 3D programming information for its video adapters - the good news here is that it's finally getting around to doing that.

• November 4, 1999: DVD encryption is cracked and DeCSS is released. The Y2K-related "windowing" patent threatens the kernel. Burn all GIFs day. The kernel gets past the longstanding 1GB limit on installed memory. Slackware 7 (the successor to Slackware 4) is released. The non-profit Red Hat Center for Open Source launches - and is never heard from again.

• November 11, 1999: Cobalt network goes public, shares begin trading at $130.

• November 18, 1999: The Linux Business Expo is held as part of the once-famous COMDEX event. Red Hat acquires Cygnus. BitKeeper is said to be getting closer to release. Mozilla hits milestone 11 and is said to be getting closer to release. Advogato.org launches.

LWN has only rarely operated booths at conferences, but we did have one at the Comdex Linux Business Expo. For the curious, here's a picture from the event featuring LWN editor Rebecca Sobol. That week's LWN edition was produced from that booth after the floor closed, under the watchful eye of security guards who didn't think we should be there. Your editor remembers it as one of the coldest experiences of his life. During the show, we subjected to constant, highly-amplified screaming obnoxiousness from the large booth being run by LinuxToday - the acquisition, it seemed, had put that site onto a rather less dignified path.

The other thing LWN was doing at this event was talking with potential suitors. One of those was a company called Atipa, which was operating a large booth of its own. Atipa was a VA-style Linux box vendor with a grand plan for a Linux portal site which would, eventually, be the place people went for Linux information. They thought that LWN would make a good addition to that portal, and were pushing hard to make a deal.

We met a few times with Atipa's CEO, a charismatic man who told a good story. The company, he said, was going to outdo even the coming VA Linux IPO, which was already clearly going to be big. Along the way he was going to pick up companies like Applix and open-source the ApplixWare office suite - something which would have been nice at the time. He stated flat out that he was soon to be a billionaire, and that we could share in that bonanza. It was quite the tale, but we tended to walk out of these meetings believing every word of it.

With some distance, though, the glow always faded. We wondered why our visit to the company's headquarters revealed a building almost devoid of people. The magic "profit happens here" step in their plans seemed less inevitable when looked at later. In the end, we did not take this deal. Thereafter, we received (unverifiable) word that Atipa's investors started asking some harder questions and found that, perhaps, they, too, had allowed themselves to be charmed more than they should have. Atipa rather abruptly found a new CEO, the IPO never happened, and investors, presumably, lost their money.

Also at the Linux Business Expo, we met with some representatives from O'Reilly. They were getting the O'Reilly network off the ground, and thought that LWN might make a good addition to it. They eventually offered us a deal (which looked more like a traditional angel investment than an acquisition) and a network affiliation which would have given us a portion of the revenue from the ads they sold. Your editor, who has a lot of respect for the people at O'Reilly, has always had a bit of regret at turning down this offer. It was an opportunity to get business advice from some very smart people. But it would almost certainly have been fatal to LWN once the advertising market fell apart.

Meanwhile, the acquisition of Cygnus by Red Hat led to a fair amount of online worrying about whether Red Hat was set to take over Linux by virtue of employing a number of GCC developers. Such fears look a little silly now, but they seemed real then.

• December 9, 1999: Andover.net goes public. The kernel gets NUMA support (during a feature freeze, remember). Sun announces a Linux Java release, rolling over the "Blackdown" team which had been working on this release for years.

• December 12, 1999: VA Linux goes public, setting the record for the largest first-day gain in NASDAQ history. Eric Raymond gets rich and lets us all know about it. The non-free BitKeeper license is revealed. LinuxCare acquires the Puffin Group and gets another $32 million. The Linux Capital Group launches; it starts by funding Progeny Linux. Companies send out "we use Linux" press releases in an attempt to make their stock price go up.

The VA IPO was not just the peak of the Linux bubble - it could well be the peak of the dotcom bubble as a whole. It was not possible to watch that stock rise to well over $300 a share on the first day and not be overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. Still, it seemed like no more than what Linux deserved, and people somehow expected it to continue.

• January 6, 2000: Linux survives Y2K. Red Hat buys Hell's Kitchen Software, does nothing with it. VA Linux launches the SourceForge site.

• January 13, 2000: Caldera Systems (later to become SCO) files for its IPO. The kernel gets a new block driver API and 32-bit UIDs - still during the feature freeze.

• January 20, 2000: LinuxCare files for its IPO. Linus Torvalds shuts down the sale of a number of Linux-related domain names. Secure Computing Corporation announces that it will be developing (what becomes) SELinux. Enoch becomes Gentoo Linux. TurboLinux completes another funding round.

Once upon a time, Caldera Systems was supposed to be among the biggest winners in the distribution sector - they had the business connections and the distribution channels. "Linux for business" got the company far enough to do an IPO, but not much beyond that. This is, of course, the company which eventually became the SCO Group.

Caldera was well overshadowed by LinuxCare, though. The distribution business always looked like a hard one to maintain over the long term - that is why Red Hat was trying to be a web portal company. Services were going to be the real gold mine, and LinuxCare was going to be at the top of the Linux support industry. The company got money from left and right (a funding round produced offers of ten times the target amount) and hired a long list of well-known Linux hackers.

Need we say that LWN's editors paid a visit to LinuxCare during this time? It was a hard time for LinuxCare to discuss acquisitions, since the IPO process was already underway, but discuss they did. So we went to the famous San Francisco headquarters. Your editor's memories from that day are strong. LinuxCare was filled with hundreds of people who all believed they were on the way toward an IPO that would exceed even VA Linux; suffice to say they were happy about the prospect. Meanwhile, though, a couple hundred of them were all working in a single not-very-large room called "the barn"; it resembled, more than anything else, a school lunchroom filled with long tables. Everybody worked on a laptop because there was no room in their tiny piece of table space for anything else. They all complained about having colds. It looked awful.

LinuxCare's negotiator was an ex-fighter jet pilot who retained the "top gun" attitude. When valuations were discussed, we were told that offering LinuxCare's pre-IPO shares at $50-60 each was being generous to us. Issues like editorial control were not really even on the table. In the end, we turned this deal down, but with a feeling like we were throwing a winning lottery ticket in the trash. Of course, subsequent events showed that we need not have worried about this particular missed opportunity.

• February 10, 2000: Real-time Linux turns out to be patented. VA Linux acquires Andover.Net. The KDE project moves to SourceForge. Atipa acquires Enhanced Software Technologies. The Linux Fund announces that it will be filing for an IPO.

The Andover.Net acquisition was announced at LinuxWorld in New York - LWN was there, of course. The initial deal included a massive pile of cash to be handed to Andover.Net's shareholders, but people questioned that handout to the extent that it eventually went away. Andover.Net's owners had to content themselves mostly with VA Linux shares, which, already, were worth considerably less than they had been on IPO day. In the end, Andover.Net turned out to be a good buy for VA Linux, once it became clear that the Linux-installed computer business was harder than it had looked.

We were approached by a VA executive at LinuxWorld to see if we were interested in maybe being acquired sometime. By then, though, we had so many offers that we couldn't really give them all serious consideration. So we did not pursue that opportunity.

But, at this event, we did talk with some representatives from ZDNet, who were also looking for a Linux site to buy. The offer they made was, by far, the most generous of any. By some reckoning, we should have taken it. Certainly it would have come out better than most of the other options we had. But ZDNet would have exercised more editorial control than we would have liked, and, being already a public company, it didn't offer that IPO "pop" that we somehow thought was our due. So we ended up not taking that path.

• February 17, 2000: devfs is merged into the mainline kernel. Also merged is the "softnet" core networking rework. Remember, the kernel is in a feature freeze.

• February 24, 2000: Eazel is founded with the goal of improving Linux usability.

To your editor, Eazel never made sense from the beginning. There was, truly, no revenue model. Indeed, it seemed like a scam designed to draw venture money for the purpose of writing Nautilus. To that extent it succeeded, but the investors cannot have been happy in the end.

• March 2, 2000: Atipa announces $30 million in investments.

• March 23, 2000: Caldera Systems goes public; its share price merely doubles. The planned date for LinuxCare's IPO passes with no offering.

• April 4, 2000: Linuxcare's IPO is pushed back to April 24 - or so they say. EBIZ acquires longtime Linux CD distributor InfoMagic. Atipa Linux Solutions acquires DCG Computer Corp. Sendmail Inc. gets $35 million in funding.

This was the point where LWN announced that it had been acquired by a company called Tucows. We had, in fact, been talking with them for some months, and had made the decision in February. It took some time, though, for the lawyers to hammer out the final agreement. In the end, we were probably exceedingly lucky: market conditions were going downhill in a hurry by this point and, had the negotiations stretched out much longer, Tucows might have started looking for reasons to back out of the deal.

Or maybe not. We went with Tucows for a number of reasons, but at the top of the list was that they were clearly smart and decent people who, while arguably being carried away by the bubble like the rest of us, clearly had a functioning business underneath it all. Their acquisition of LWN never yielded the benefits they were looking for, but the people at Tucows always treated us well and we still count them as friends. Perhaps we were smart, or perhaps we were just very lucky, but, in retrospect, we came out of a complex, high-stakes process having made what was probably the best possible decision.

The Tucows acquisition made it possible for LWN editors Rebecca Sobol and Forrest Cook to join as regular staff members. It also positioned us within a safe harbor for the dotcom crash, which was already in progress. But the story of those years will be the subject of next week's installment.

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Lovely article and quite interesting history. It's been the tradition of bubble markets that
the insanity they create draws in scammers and quick talkers. History is replete with examples
of fast talking personable people with no experience coming in and selling a bill of goods to
investors while riding the insanity of the bubble market. Fortunately the dotcom bubble
pre-IPO monetary losses were heavily focused on Venture Capital firms and not the average
middle class family to the extent it was in previous bubbles.

It's interesting to hear firsthand about some of the fast talkers that tried to open
businesses and IPO's with no business plan, no employees and no market to sell into but
funding from a load of Venture Capital funds inspired by the mania in the market. Thanks for
producing this series.  

Just about everybody's retirement fund lost a lot.

Imaginary money aside, an enormous amount of real money changed hands, and it all went into
somebody's else's pocket.  Investors' money was turned over in big chunks to owners of market
research companies, and to Sun, Cisco, and Oracle.  I.e., the main result of the bubble was to
transfer money from your parents to Larry Ellison and his friends.

My parents didn't transfer any money to anyone. Having been born during the great depression
and growing up in a rural state during the great decline in rural towns and business in the
this nation all my parents funds were held in cash or cash like instruments. The money lost in
IPO's and the bubble in general had little to no impact on them. Please don't make ASSumptions
about my parents. 

Keep in mind my statement wasn't about the general market or even the stock market, but about
the companies without real businesses that barely made it to IPO or barely missed it (such as
the article's references to Atipa and their fast talking CEO). You are attributing the general
market decline that was caused by the dot-com bubble collapse to what I said when my intent
was to talk about the shysters and fast talkers that show up during every bubble and insight
into such provided by the article. The general market decline was the result of the reduction
in sales, capital availability and bad debt that the dot-com bubble caused. Also in markets
that were a party to the dot-com bubble (California) you saw large economic declines due to
the people that were employed by the dot-coms being unemployed and affected materially by the
loss. Most of the general market losses have already been returned. Only those invested
heavily in technology were affected significantly by the bubble for more than a few years. 

I stand by my statement that the ones that lost money as a direct result of the shenanigans
during the dot-com bubble were the venture capital funds, most of which are privately held
investment firms with often small numbers of extremely wealthy investors. IIRC Microsoft
co-founder Paul Allen lost around 12 billion dollars on bad businesses during the dot-com
bubble that he funded with his Vulcan venture capital firm. You can read a fairly fluffy piece
about his mistakes here:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_18/b38811...

His losses alone likely make yours insignificant by comparison.

That's for a value of "your" evidently not including "rahvin's".  There are other readers
here.

Paul Allen's losses affected his available life choices not a bit.  The venture funds drew
principally not on the extremely wealthy, but on funds controlled by investment managers.  The
sum cost to our (collective) parents  dwarfs that of the billionaire investors, and the effect
on each of our lives was much larger.

"The venture funds drew principally not on the extremely wealthy, but on funds controlled by
investment managers."

I challenge you to back up your assertion with facts. Present the ownership of many of the
dot-com venture capital funds and their tie in with general market funds the average
middle-class American invested in? I know of not a single venture capital fund that draws on
funds from middle-class Americans or their investment managers. In fact I don't know of a
single publicly held venture capital fund, every one I'm aware of is held privately where
investment in the fund is by invitation only. In fact the following quote from the Yahoo!
Finance glossary quotes the following:

" Venture capital (VC)
    Venture capital is financing provided by wealthy independent investors, banks, and
partnerships to help new businesses get started, reach the next level of growth, or go
public.In return for the money they put up, also called risk capital, the investors may play a
role in the company's management as well as receive some combination of equity, profits, or
royalties. Some venture capital also goes into bankrupt companies to help them turn around, or
to companies that the management wants to take private by buying up all of the outstanding
shares."

The first sentence bearing the most important detail. The wealthy independent investors are
not listed first by chance. Your continued insistence on reference to the financial damage to
parents leads me to believe you are too young to have experienced the investment world. Of all
the people I know that actually invest in the market every single one has recovered every
dollar lost in the dot-com bubble. In fact my investment club was extremely hard hit by the
general market collapse that followed the dot-com bubble (but more importantly the 9/11
attack), losing well over 50% of it's value but has easily recovered all loses plus reasonable
gains since. I must admit the investors I know are well versed in the market and have been
investing much longer than the 10+ years I have been and wisdom comes with experience but I
highly doubt they or myself are outside the norm. Maybe other posters wish to step forward and
relate how their portfolio now fairs a little over 7 years since the collapse, even if it's so
far off topic.

But I look forward to your list of venture capital funds that are funded out of general
investors funds controlled by investment managers as you claim. Please include the funds
connection to the dot-com funding bonanza that took place. 

I guess I should also add, in interest of full disclosure and to revive this thread's nice
reminiscing tone, that the only way the bubble affected *me* was the ~$30k windfall I got for
having a SourceForge.net account.  (VA was having trouble finding enough developers to take
the pre-IPO stock it had reserved for them, so it started just offering it to everyone who'd
registered a username at the then-relatively-new SF).   I was 18, and *just* grudgingly
admitting that I needed to find my first job...  I lived for two years on that money :-).  So,
if you know anyone who spent >$100 for a share of LNUX, you can tell them that *some* of that
cash went to a good cause.  At least by some standards...

While I am sure that there were many scammers involved in the "bubble," the vast majority of
the lost money was "lost" (transferred actually) in perfectly legal/ethical ways from people
who "cared less"/"payed less attention" to risk/value to those who "cared more"/"payed more
attention" to risk/value.  

This is in no way an evil thing, and the implication that the vast majority of this money was
stolen (it would have to be the vast majority, for it to affect the vast majority of people,)
is simply a dishonest/misleading use of words.  

Markets go up and down, values change, but mostly in the upward direction.  Most people get
richer all the time even including the losses from bubbles.  Those who are better at managing
risk survive this better than others and were probably the ones to whom much of this money was
transferred (as with the current real estate crisis).  This is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing
(although it may feel bad when you're on the losing side of this transfer).  Those who are
better at managing money (read "resources") will get to manage more of it than those who are
not good at managing it.  Would you prefer it the other way around?

The key is to remember that we all (vast majority) are better off and get richer because of
this because there will be more resources all around!  While there may be a greater gap
because of this between the richer and the poorer sometimes, the poorer are still better off
in the vast majority of cases. 

Those who "lost" money will learn to manage it better next time, and will have less to waste
on bad investments (that "bad" feeling mentioned above will help ensure this!)  "Bad
investments" here does not imply scams, but rather simply things such as: research that simply
did not pay off, or over -investments into areas that were already (too) well funded...  Those
who stopped investing in bad investments early enough (the ones who received those loses,)
helped the economy correct itself eventually.   Without this withdrawal from the bubble by the
more conservative, the bubble would have gotten worse and worse (more and more resources
wasted), making everyone poorer and poorer!

So while, yes, there were many scammers riding a wave during the bubble, this does not account
for the losses that most people attribute to the bubble bursting, and these scams therefore
affected way fewer people than implied in many of the posts above.  Of course, it is easier to
imagine that one was scammed out of one's money than to admit that one simply didn't manage it
well (this is not implied about any of the posters, just the general populace).

As with the recent series from U. Drepper, I hope that there is a way to purchase a nicely
bound version of this once complete.

I love those comments comments about kernel 2.3 kernel development.

"So and so huge fundamental change is made to the 2.3 kernel. Remember, the kernel is in a
feature freeze."

LOL :)

Yes!  The continuing drumbeat of those is great fun :)

Did I miss the mention of what happened to Elizabeth Coolbaugh?

Or perhaps the world moved at a more relaxed pace then.  Nonetheless, the unraveling of the
scam seemed extremely swift.  I was in awe at how rapidly those that researched the firm bared
its tawdry essence.  It soon seemed common knowledge, even among the denser of the investor
class.  It was remarkable how this group of researchers educated the public so quickly.  In
contrast it took ages to deflate the SCO fiasco.

> In contrast it took ages to deflate the SCO fiasco.

That would be because the US legal system takes pains to be seen to be 
impartial.  LinuxOne wasn't the "little guy" plaintiff against a very 
large corporation in a legal case, it was merely seeking investment cash.  
It was tried in the court of public opinion and by potential investors 
doing due diligence -- these processes are faster than the courts.

It would be because of the legal system, but not because of anything that can reasonably be
attributed to being particularily impartial.

It is flat out outrageous and ridicolous that one can make concrete, verifiable claims for a
court, and then proceed to stall for like a decade when prompted to provide any evidence
whatsoever.

To the contrary: the process guarantees that the system is -not- impartial, but favors those
with deep pockets. It's not much comfort to you that you -may- win in 7 years if the problem
in question is going to bankrupt you in 3.

Not a problem in this -particular- case, since SCO, clearly the agressor, is also the one with
the least deep pockets. But often enough it's the other way around.

I'm also pretty sure that in this case it is because IBM wants to salt SCO's earth, and make a
statement that one Does Not Fuck With Us. Doing that most properly means doing it slowly and
painfully.

There is no way IBM legal's plan of attack involved "slowly and painfully."  IBM is a
busniness, not an inner city gang.

I have been a reader of LWN probably almost since issue 1.  At that point, late '97, I was an
avid reader of Slashdot and undoubtedly discovered LWN through it.

I had experimentally used Slackware since September 1996 and gradually used it more and more
through '97, even though I bought an upgrade copy of Windows '95 during that summer.  I can't
explain my exact reason why, but it was right at 10 years ago, around the middle of January
1998 as I recall, that I decided that I ought to see how using Slackware full time as my
personal OS would work out.  10 years later and now happily using Debian, I am not sorry for
the decision.

I felt like a bit of an early adopter in those days as shortly after resolving to not boot
into the Windows partition any more than necessary, Netscape "open sourced" what is now known
as Mozilla Seamonkey (although I don't think any of the original code remains) and LWN was
launched.

I'd like to say that great minds think alike, but I kept working in the same telecom job I
work today.  Linux is my hobby and personal learning tool.  Through the dot com bubble and
beyond, I've yet to earn one red cent from it.  I have earned much more knowledge in the
eleven years after trying Linux than in the 13 years of computing prior to that point.  I have
also been privileged to be able give a little back to the community over the years.

It has been a fun and interesting decade and I believe we here have all made the right choice.
Congrats, Jon and all involved, on 10 years of LWN and here's to wishing LWN many happy
returns.

Heh, your story closely resembles mine, except that I had changed my jobs more often. I
started to dig into Linux&FreeBSD in late 1997, made Linux my main work system in May..June
1999, and did not miss a single LWN issue probably since the beginning of 2001. I hope once in
a time to become paying LWN subscriber, but in my country I don't have an easy and
low-overhead way to pay for it.

This was a fun time, and I myself changed from a regional ISP to a new company at the end of
99 / beginning of 2000. This was crazy; I was flown to interview a prospective employer in NYC
during LinuxWorld. There, I was suddenly invited to a dinner with Zero Knowledge Systems who
handed me a ticket to Montreal for the next day, because I absolutely had to check them out,
dude ... Not to mention a bunch of other companies. And eventually met the folks from the
company whom I'm still working for today, who assured me their growth was "organic" and not
hyped; which turned out to not be exactly true, but relatively to the others, it sure was.

Those were the days, where we got picked up with limo service at the OLS conference, one could
fly around the world to speak at a regional LUG meeting. Today, that hype is reserved for web
2.0 and social networks... Everybody should be in a hype once in their life ;-)

I'm not sure Eazel were competent, but they did have a plan, and not even a completely insane
one- .mac-like services, which Apple seems to find economically viable these days, and which
others (Ubuntu, Fedora) have been rumored to be looking into. Nautilus was to be part of the
front end for those services, and hence had to be written (especially given how terrible the
old file manager was.)

Now, they were completely crazy to have thought they could do get to profitability, given
their burn rate, but... I don't think the core idea was a scam.

>Nautilus was to be part of the front end for those services, and hence had 
> to be written (especially given how terrible the old file manager was.)

Disagree. gmc was the best file manager GNOME ever had. When Nautilus replaced gmc, I switched
to KDE.

Agreed.  Other than massively more memory usage, I don't really see what Nautilus brings to
the kitchen.  That whole spatial gaffe was downright embarrassing.

In the past, I've been tempted to propose Thunar for inclusion in Gnome.  It is getting quite
complete, feels 3X faster, and takes less than 1/6 of the memory.  I expect it wouldn't be too
hard to add any missing features and it would certainly be much easier than trying to clean up
the Nautilus code base.  If only I had free time...