This is the free-software world, after all, and Eazel protected much of its code under the Free Software Foundation's GPL license, meaning, theoretically, that it should always be available to anyone who wanted to keep working on it, whether or not the company that had funded its original development was still around. And, to be sure, less than 24 hours after the announcement that Eazel was closing its doors, one mailing list devoted to Linux desktop interface development recorded an impressive level of disaster management.

Darin Adler, lead developer of the Nautilus project, a file system manager that free software fans have been lusting after ever since it was originally announced, noted that he would continue to maintain the Nautilus project for the "foreseeable future." Andy Hertzfeld, famous for his work designing the original Macintosh interface, promised to personally host "what remains of the Eazel Web site" and declared to the list that he would keep working on the code. He also said, in an e-mail to me, that "I have some terrific, breakthrough capabilities for Nautilus on the drawing board, and I'm going to make them happen one way or another."

Other developers from Eazel announced that they would be taking care of various other software packages. Some mailing lists would find new hosts, and some new volunteers have already jumped in to declare their readiness to pitch in. All in all, it was an encouraging sight -- Eazel may be gone, but Eazel's contributions will not be erased so easily. As Havoc Pennington, a Red Hat developer, declared to the gnome-hackers mailing list: "The nice thing about free software is that you can only add to it, it never goes away, so its forward progress has a kind of inevitability."

Or does it? Free software may truly never go away, but will it stay relevant to the contemporary software marketplace? The collapse of Eazel, combined with the difficulties faced by many other companies with open-source/free software dependent business plans, raises some serious questions about the future (and past) of free software. Namely: Just what role did the bubble economy of the '90s play in free software's march to prominence? With the immediate corollary question being: Now that the downturn is truly sinking its teeth into the high-tech sector, how long, or how fast, can free software development continue?

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.