GNOME Files, formerly called Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. The name is a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 (2001) and has been the default from version 2.0 onwards.Nautilus was the flagship product of the now-defunct Eazel Inc company. Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, Nautilus is free software.