Old Apple Macintosh Team Aims to Put Linux on the Desktop

Old Apple Macintosh Team Aims to Put Linux on the Desktop

By John Markoff
The New York Times

February 21, 2000

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The Beatles never got back together, but four members of the original Apple Macintosh team are regrouping. And they mean to take the best of the quirky Apple computer and move it to the world of Linux software.

Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Boich, Susan Kare and Guy Tribble are busy trying to re-create the innovative tone originally set by Apple Computer's founder, Steven Jobs, when he led a band of renegades to design the Macintosh in the early 1980s.

Thor Swift for The New York Times
Mike Boich, left, Andy Hertzfeld and Guy Tribble want to make the Linux system easier for ordinary PC users.

They work in a low-slung, nondescript office building here, filled with Silicon Valley-style cubicles and adorned with the ubiquitous penguin mascot of the Linux free software movement. They plan to take some of the best ideas on computer ease of use and blend them into a new visual desktop interface for Linux. With others in the movement, their goal is to transform the Linux operating system, which has been designed and maintained by a rag-tag group of computer hackers, into a direct desktop competitor to Microsoft's Windows.

The group founded Eazel Inc. last fall with financial backing from the Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway and the former Apple and Macromedia executive John Colligan. Mike Homer, a former executive for Apple and Netscape, is also on the board. This summer, Eazel plans to begin offering a free user interface -- an icon-based software control system that can be downloaded from the Internet -- that they say will give Linux an ease-of-use advantage over Macintosh and Windows-based computers.

Eazel's biggest coup to date has been in persuading Tribble to leave Sun Microsystems, where he had been chief technology officer for Sun's alliance with Netscape. Known as a brilliant software designer who made significant contributions to the original Macintosh, introduced in 1984, Tribble followed Jobs two years later to Next Inc. There, he led the design of the software interface for the Next system, before joining Sun in 1993.

Eazel faces a serious challenge. Microsoft has just begun shipping a more robust version of its Windows operating system, Windows 2000, and Linux has only a minuscule share of the market for desktop personal computers -- the primary market for Eazel's Linux interface.

Linux's strength to date has been in the market for server computers -- network machines on which the user interface and popular desktop applications are much less important. Currently, Linux has a 25 percent share of the server market, compared with 38 percent for Windows. But on the desktop, only 4 percent of the 99 million operating systems sold in the United States last year were Linux, according to International Data Corp., a market research company.

But for Andy Hertzfeld, a programmer whose business card reads "software wizard," market share is not necessarily what matters.

Along with the hardware designer Burrell Smith, Hertzfeld was the very soul of the original Macintosh development team, a group of computer designers who professed a passionate belief that their new computer would change the world. But after Jobs was forced out of Apple by its former chief executive, John Sculley, in 1985, Hertzfeld became disillusioned by the company's corporate politics.

He left Apple and began pursuing software design for non-PC based computing devices, like intelligent stereo systems. In 1990 he helped found General Magic, a design effort underwritten by Apple, Sony and other consumer electronics companies intent on devising a hand-held wireless computer.

After General Magic failed, Hertzfeld turned his programming explorations to the World Wide Web. Then, in January 1998, he noticed Netscape's announcement that the company would freely distribute what it called the Mozilla version of Netscape's browser software for use by the so-called open source programming community.

Open source code -- free distribution of the underlying program instructions for software, so that other programmers can pursue further development -- is one of the basic principles behind the open or free software movement that Mozilla and, even more important, Linux, came to represent.

Hertzfeld had known Richard Stallman, one of the founders of the free software movement, for more than 15 years. But Stallman had always struck him as a "kook," he said. When Hertzfeld himself began to rethink the idea of free software, he concluded that Stallman was a visionary.

"It became so obvious to me," Hertzfeld said. "The shared software infrastructure should be owned by the community. It's beautiful and it's correct. And so I started working in the free software world."

Completely free software, of course, will not pay the rent. So last summer Hertzfeld began to think about the idea of turning his passion into a business. With Mike Boich, another early Macintosh programmer who had gone on to start several Silicon Valley computer hardware companies, Hertzfeld searched for a way to combine the free-software philosophy with a for-profit business.

Along with Bart Decrem, a Stanford law school graduate who had created a nonprofit technology access center in East Palo Alto, Calif., the two former Macintosh designers struck upon the idea of designing a free user interface for Linux and then selling a highly automated form of Linux service and support on a subscription basis. The Eazel team persuaded Susan Kare, a graphic artist who designed icons for the original Macintosh and also for Microsoft, to join their effort.

There are now at least 140 competing distributors of the Linux operating system, and both Microsoft and Apple are already pursuing similar Internet-based software-support ideas. So Eazel could have trouble distinguishing itself in an already crowded field.

But Hertzfeld contends that by automating many of the system-configuration and management tasks that are now barriers to ordinary computer users, the Linux community can achieve the same kind of growth on the PC desktop that it is now seeing in the computer and Internet server markets, creating a market big enough for many players.

Some industry analysts say that Eazel's timing may be right, if the Linux movement can build the kind of popular applications that are now largely dominated by Microsoft in the PC industry -- programs like word processors, spreadsheets and databases.

"Eazel is at the right time," said Dan Kusnetsky, an operating system analyst at International Data. "Nobody has made a major impact on the desktop with Linux yet because the barrier has been applications."

Eazel has formed an alliance with the group of Linux programmers who developed the Gnome interface for the Linux operating system. Under this pact, the Eazel team has taken responsibility for the appearance -- the "look and feel" of the program that serves as the control panel for the Linux operating system -- while the Gnome group will concentrate on the internal plumbing.

The Gnome programmers are led by Miguel de Icaza, a Mexican software programmer who is the guiding light behind one of the two main user interfaces in the Linux world. The other main interface is a desktop manager system known as KDE -- for K Desktop Environment -- which is also widely used by Linux programmers. But Hertzfeld's programmers decided that the Gnome team more closely matched their style and perspective.

"Gnome just resonated with my spirit," Hertzfeld said, while acknowledging differences between the older, original Macintosh people and the younger, free-software hackers. "It was a little bit strange meeting them," he said. "We felt like graybeards and they seemed like teen-agers."

In fact, the year-old relationship has not been painless. The two groups talked about, then rejected, the idea of merging, and they have quibbled over various technical issues. In the end, though, Hertzfeld said he believed that the two teams' ability to reach an accommodation illustrates the strength of the Linux programming movement.

De Icaza, in turn, has started his own company, aiming at the heart of Microsoft's dominant Office suite of business-productivity application programs. His company, Helixcode, based in Boston, is finishing a free Linux competitor to Office that includes a word processor, spreadsheet and mail and calendar program.

But de Icaza remains cautious about how quickly the Eazel-Gnome alliance will be able to mount a direct challenge to the world's largest software company in the operating system market. "I'm not so sure how vulnerable Microsoft is," he said.