I was not involved in this in any way other than being an avid Linux user, but I remember it quite well. A very popular conversation among Linux nerds in the ea

I was not involved in this in any way other than being an avid Linux user, but I remember it quite well. A very popular conversation among Linux nerds in the early 2000's was, "what if this thing actually takes off?" There were quite a few Linux-related start-ups around this time that were fueled by dollars from the dot-com boom. As is the usual story, Eazel had same "hire people now and figure out how to make money later" strategy that caused the bubble to burst. There were quite a few high-publicized commercial ventures into the Linux space around this time: Ximian, Corel Linux, VA Linux. Others that I'm forgetting. As to the software, when it was new, Nautilus was absolute garbage. It was memory-hungry, slow, and crashed often while doing perfectly normal things. Eazel had ambitious plans for it, but it didn't really stabilize into something useful until several years later after the community removed most of the bloat and it just became a regular file manager.