Sun to include Eazel software with Solaris

Following a similar recent deal with Dell, open-source software maker Eazel Monday announced that its Nautilus file manager and Web browsing tool will be distributed with machines running Sun's Solaris operating system.

Eazel touts its ability to make open source operating systems easier to use. The Nautilus software has made inroads toward making Linux more accessible to the mass market and now Sun looks to install Nautilus with Solaris.

The company wants to bundle applications on as many machines as possible and then generate revenue from a series of Internet-based services. With Eazel's software already on a PC, the company thinks it can more easily drive users toward a variety of file-management services delivered via the Web.

In a deal struck in late November, Dell agreed to bundle Nautilus on select Linux PCs and to invest in Eazel.

In a similar arrangement, Sun will bundle Nautilus, which is based on the upcoming GNOME 2.0 graphical user interface, for the Solaris operating system. Eazel built its applications on the Gnome desktop-operating environment - one of the two major interface choices among open-source providers. The other is K Desktop Environment - KDE.

Sun also will sponsor a section on Eazel's Web site. Nautilus should ship with all Solaris machines, including workstations and servers, by the third quarter of next year.

"The core of this agreement is that Sun goes ahead and ships Nautilus with its workstations and Internet devices," Eazel Vice President of Marketing Brain Croll said in an interview. "The realization is that people want a new kind of user environment that is more suitable for the network."

Eazel's approach to its Nautilus software seems in line with Sun's Net Effect mantra. Both companies seek to design products with the Internet in mind. They often accuse rival Microsoft with taking an antiquated approach to its applications, claiming it simply retrofits existing software to handle a new, networked world. Microsoft, however, maintains a firm grip on the PC operating system market and is yet to face serious challenge in that space.

In order to attract networked users, Eazel's Network User Environment (NUE), which is built into Nautilus, embeds program components on the desktop, which the company claims reduces the time it takes to view a file. With the increasing use of digital media, for example, a user could click a sound file and run it without waiting for a media application to load up.

Also along these lines, Sun's StarOffice productivity suite will stand as the default viewer for StarOffice and Microsoft Office files on the machines running Nautilus. Users will have access to the embedded component features for document and spreadsheet viewers, helping these commonly used applications load at a quicker clip.

Eazel claims its NUE-based file-viewing capabilities along with its file-storage service and software-loading service make Nautilus a strong set of applications for networked computing. The software maker might again face challenges with this approach, however, as Microsoft will also upgrade its Web-centric operating system plans with the release of the Whistler operating system next year.

Several of the executives at Eazel were on the original development team for the Macintosh operating system.

Eazel, in Mountain View, Calif., can be reached at 650-940-2000 or www.eazel.com. Sun, in Palo Alto, can be reached at 650-960-1300 or at www.sun.com/.