Lutris Technologies

Lutris Technologies
Founded 1995
Defunct 2005
Headquarters Santa Cruz, California
Products XMLC Enhydra Server

Lutris Technologies, Inc. was an enterprise software and services company based in Santa Cruz, California.

History

Lutris was founded by Paul Morgan and Michael Browder, two ex-employees of the Santa Cruz Operation about 1995, initially under the name of Information Refinery, Incorporated (IRI). The main business of the company was building web sites using the Java Platform, initially through consulting contracts. To facilitate the design and implementation of these web sites, the company built an Extensible Markup Language (XML) manipulation tool: XMLC, and Enhydra Server, a general purpose application server.[1]

Initial venture capital funding of $10 million came in November 1999 from investors Chase Capital Partners and Chase H&Q (formerly Hambrecht & Quist).[2] A second round for a total of $15 million, announced in February 2000, included TransCosmos USA, and the Intel 64 Fund.[3] On August 23, 2000 an additional $16 million in funding was announced from Compaq and NEC.[4] Presidents included David H. Young and Yancy Lind.[1]

The names were puns on Enhydra lutris, the scientific name for the sea otter which inhabits nearby Monterey Bay. The logo for Enhydra featured a sea otter with a cup of coffee (a further pun on the slang term "Java").[5]

Enhydra Server

Main article: Enhydra Server

Enhydra Server is a Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) application server that was used on most Lutris-developed sites (including the Customatix project). In January 1999 Lutris created an open-source software community of related projects including Enhydra Server.[6] In October 1999, Lutris announced their intention to develop Enhydra Server v4 as an open-source enterprise-grade Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server (later to be known as Enhydra Enterprise). There was considerable press interest in whether this was compatible with Sun Microsystems' licensing model for Java EE, which was distributed under the Sun Community Source License (SCSL).[7] In March 2000, Lutris launched a commercial, boxed Enhydra Server product including support. In late 1999, Lutris purchased InstantDB, a Java database management system distributed on a free-for-non-commercial-use basis developed Peter Hearty and a company called ICS.[8] Lutris announced their intent to distributed InstantDB as open-source. Enhydra Enterprise made its first beta release in April 2001. Intel published a reference architecture for the software.[9]

By June 2001 the InstantDB project was removed from enhydra.org, and Lutris announced that the InstantDB code would not after all be open-sourced. The Enhydra Enterprise open source repository was shut down in September 2001, with Lutris management citing the Java EE SCSL conditions as the reason, which gave rise to frustration in the open source community.[10][11] Many community participants migrated to the fledgling JBoss project.[7]

The end

After the dot-com bubble burst, nearly all Lutris staff were laid off in waves from late 2001 to early 2002.[12] By April it was down from a high of about 190 employees in three buildings, to eight.[13] The company continued operation under a new name of Gridion, and developed a distributed high performance computing platform based on trading compute resources for grid computing. In April 2002, ObjectWeb, now known as the OW2 Consortium, took over hosting of Enhydra Server and Enhydra Enterprise.[14] In November 2003, Together Teamlosungen EDV-Dienstleistungen GmbH. acquired the copyrights to Enhydra Server and Enhydra Enterprise and released them under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The company was finally wound up sometime in 2005.

References

  1. 1 2 David H. Young (January 15, 2002). Enhydra XMLC Java Presentation Development. Sams White Books. ISBN 978-0672322112.
  2. ↑ Jennifer Pittman (December 14, 1999). "SC Internet consultant gets $10M boost". Santa Cruz Sentinel. With the announcement today of a $10 million investment from Chase Capital Partners and Chase H&Q, formerly Hambrecht and Quist, it’s full speed ahead.
  3. ↑ "Lutris Technologies Receives Investment From the Intel 64 Fund and Trans Cosmos". Linux Today. February 9, 2000. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  4. ↑ Elizabeth Montalbano (August 23, 2000). "Compaq, NEC Invest In Open-Source Firm Lutris". CRN. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  5. ↑ "The Home of Enhydra.org". Archived from the original on May 29, 2001. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  6. ↑ David H. Young (April 1, 2002). "XMLC vs. JSP". The Server Side blog. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  7. 1 2 Mario Morejon (November 16, 2001). "Java Licensing Under Fire". CRN. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  8. ↑ Grant Gross interview of Yancy Lind (October 18, 2001). "Lutris CEO answers critics of decision to back away from Enhydra.org". Linux.com. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  9. ↑ "For Web and Wireless Solutions, Lutris Delivers Robust, Java/XML Application Servers on Intel® Architecture" (PDF). Solutions Profile. Intel. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 27, 2002. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  10. ↑ Elizabeth Montalbano (April 4, 2002). "Lutris Technologies Out of Java App Server Business". CRN. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  11. ↑ George C. Hawkins (October 10, 2001). "How Lutris betrayed the Open Source Community". Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  12. ↑ Jennifer Pittman (February 18, 2001). "Lutris lays off 30; aims for profit". Santa Cruz Sentinel. Lutris Technologies laid off 30 employees and consolidated its three downtown Santa Cruz offices into a single building last week
  13. ↑ Michael de Give (April 9, 2002). "Lutris lays off all but eight workers". Santa Cruz Sentinel.
  14. ↑ James Niccolai (January 20, 2005). "Users put ObjectWeb software to work: Conference shows increasing corporate interest". Info World. Retrieved August 25, 2013.

External links

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