Changes in Lycoris

tim1980 writes "Joseph Cheek CEO of Lycoris has published a letter to their customers and the community. In the letter Joe addresses many outstanding issues that have gone unresolved over the past few months, and outlines major changes to Lycoris the company, the products, and future direction. Quote: '... During the past week I have felt that there are other unresolved issues with Lycoris as a company. In particular, I have taken a hard look at our current business model and whether it is sustainable or not. Currently I conclude that our business model is not sustainable, and have decided to make some other fundamental changes....' There's also a forum thread @ Lycoris.org."

erhm....

[passthecrackpipe]

Who? whao are these people? how is Lycoris relevant? what do they deliver to the community? I read the letter as: "We make commercial software, built on non-commercial software, people don't buy our stuff enough, we messed up big time in a lot of places, and we are going to cut down products" Ly-who?

Lycoris

[JHromadka]

I've never been a big fan of the stuff. Tastes too much like poppyseed or chewing tobacco. :)

What IS Lycoris???

[advocate_one]

even their home page fails to give any clues to what they actually do... No mention that they produce a Linux distribution at all... just vague references to something called "SME Server" and something called "Desktop/LX". If you were just browsing around and happened up their homepage, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they had something to do with greenhouses... No wonder people are confused, the company itself is a bit confused as well.

Re:What IS Lycoris???

[BenjiTheGreat98]

Lycoris is much like Lindows (or whatever it is now). They aim to be very much like MS Windows. It was initially supposed to be a distro you could use to wean yourself off of MS Windows. It was the first distro I successfully installed when I first started using Linux a few years back. The times between release date where very infrequent and as I recall the distro just wasn't that great in the first place. It seems like it was kinda buggy. Of course I was a noob back in those days too.

Re:What IS Lycoris???

[Ivan the Terrible]

lycoris.org is not the homepage for the commercial operation, lycoris.com is.

Re:What IS Lycoris???

[maggotbrain_777]

As of late September, Lycoris announced [contribs.org] that it would handle the development and support of SME server. This is a customised RedHat Linux mail-server/gateway package that appears to have a substantial install base in K-12 school districts, as well as in my company. Additionally, they just migrated contribs.org [contribs.org], SMEs primary developer and support forums, over to their datacenter. Personally, I've found the site to be an invaluable resource for supporting this platform.

Mindshare... or the lack thereof

[HighOrbit]

Other than the customer service issue in not shipping to paying customers (that by itself is a big problem), Lycoris has never gained any following in the community. Lycoris is trying to make money selling Linux. Nothing wrong with that. But what have they given back to the community? They never made a profit selling shrink-wraped boxes. Well neither did Redhat (and they are the Linux market leader), but Redhat responed with Fedora and, after initial grumbling, kept their goodwill. What kind of goodwill has Lycoris tried to generate? So far the only buzz I ever see about Lycoris is just that.... buzz and PR releases, but not a lot of released software (at least none that gets any press). Has anybody seen anything from them?

Re:Mindshare... or the lack thereof

[Otter]

But what have they given back to the community?

In fairness to them, it sounds like they tried to put too many members of their "community" into paid positions without the revenue or system to support them. If anything, they seemed to have tried to share the wealth too much.

Before You Start...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Before the threads about Linux/Open Source not being a viable business model start(Balmer, this means you), please take a peek at this link [google.ie]