Lutris Closes Enhydra Source

Ron van Balen writes: "Lutris has retracted the open source Entreprise Enhydra product. The old version will remain open source, but the open source community will not get access to the new J2EE compliant product. The decision was made because Sun J2EE license requirements don't allow an open source release, Lutris says. Lutris also says it wil refocus its efforts to its commercial products and support the open source community at a lower priority. It seems there is one less commercially supported OSS project on the planet." Newsforge has an excellent piece on this as well which gets into the reasoning and details on this move.

Comments

Uh, this is OLD NEWS- and the title's misleading!

[Svartalf]

This tidbit ran sometime last week on LinuxToday- and the title they're closing the source to Enhydra's misleading; it's Enterprise Enhydra that they're closing the source to, not Enhydra itself.

Why use Enhydra?

[elefantstn]

I'm not sure why someone looking for a J2EE implementation would go to Enhydra. JBoss is a much better, robust, mature platform for that sort of thing than Enhydra. None of this is to say that Enhydra is worthless - it's very good at what it does, which is a much more lightweight Java web platform than DB + EJB + Servlets + the kitchen sink which is what full J2EE servers are. In fact, most projects would be better off with the lighter-weight Enhydra, especially published-content type projects.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is Lutris should have kept Enhydra the way it was, and not screwed around with J2EE. We have JBoss for that, and Enhydra filled a much different need. The whole mess could have been avoided.

An Alternative

[robbyjo]

SourceForge has nice projects: Open Business or Enigma for J2EE business software. It is still far from finish, but at least you can help to make it happen.

More on the Lutris Situation

[LeeZard]

I have worked with Lutris in the past with both Enhydra (version 2.3-3.0 and spec'd migration to the J2EE framework in enterprise) and there is more to all of this than just licenses from Sun and the J2EE framework. Don't get me wrong, what has been pointed out previously about the reference implementation and redeployment with different license terms would be an issue, but its more of a business trying to remain afloat.

Lutris was a consulting services company to start with. Enhydra was developed by bringing together a lot of what they used to develop and deploy customer web applications in previous projects. Since they were a consulting services company first, an open source process served to both (marginally) push forward the development of the applications server with public support, but also create a low barrier to adoption for companies to get the services process in the door. I was a software director at one of those companies that adopted the process and then moved to bring in the consulting side to deploy a very large application on.

Things were going great there when the economy was going great -- consulting services paid all the bills for the engineering crew to continue the primary development of the app server. The problem is when the economy turned south, the first thing to be cut were the consulting groups. Lutris had their contracts drying up and couldn't continue to pay the bills that way. Pretty soon they were left with a model that wouldn't work in an economy without a lot of free cash. There had to be another way to generate revenue or to go out of business. That model had to concentrate on traditional software development and open source companies haven't weathered that storm very well when there were commercial or other products that had more functionality or more entrenched customer bases. The quickest way to catch up was to push the enhydra enterprise process, use as much as possible to get it to a finished state (Sun ref implementation) and try to pull in product revenue with traditional sales. This couldn't be rectified with the open source licenses they were previously working on.

It's economics. Sure Sun's license for using their implementation of things is going to effect that, but its an after the fact reason. The underlying problem is that a consulting services company with no contracts isn't going to stay in business... A software company at least has a fighting chance.

I had friends that work(ed) there and this is not necessarily what they wanted out of things, but the survival instinct can be a powerful one. Has the discovery channel taught us nothing?