Interview with Joseph Cheek of Lycoris

Glykoriza writes "Lots of talk lately about the future of Linux in the desktop. Red Hat wants to have a piece of the pie, while Lindows seems to do well too. Lycoris seems to do great as well, they released their latest beta a few days ago, and they have already made deals with retailers, like Fry's. OSNews hosts an interview with Lycoris' CTO and founder, Joseph Cheek."

Comments

On the subject of Lindows

[DaneelGiskard]

Did anyone yet take a closer look on them? Is everything they do in accordance to the respective licenses? I know that they are using a lot of GPL programs, but the only source code I can find is here

http://www.lindows.com/lindows_products_categori es . hp?category=29

and it doesn't seem to be much.

Also, one can only download (often GPL'd) software from them if he pays them a fee to access this software

http://www.lindows.com/lindows_products_categori es . hp

is that ok too?

Don't get me wrong. I'm a linux enhtusiast too and would love if linux finally came to the desktop and I would also love seeing a company making money with desktop linux...but I have a strange feeling about the legality of what lindows does....can anyone enlighten me? Or just join the discussion?

Re:What makes Fry's special?

[zandermander]

Dear Obvious Guy,

Obviously you've never been to Fry's. They are a California-based electronics chain but far, far better than CompUSA, Best Buy, Radio Shack....

I have had the pleasure of living near a Fry's for 9 months and, basically, it is a Slashdotter's wet dream. You name it geeky/gadget/electronic/radio/software... they've got it.

I hope you too one day have the chance to visit a Fry's.

Customers (MIS depts) or users?

[crovira]

Users, being stuck in the office on nice days, having to schlep to the office on nasty ones, occasionally confronting the BSoD, having to put up with their idiot colleagues, Hell, having to work at all, have no love for M$ or much of anything else work related.

M$ may not be kidding itself about that but I suspect that the reality distortion field around Bill Gates these days makes the one around Steve Jobs look like clear-eyed, realistic pragmatism.

Users don't like M$. The great majority of them hate it. Its work.

Customers, the OEM who just want to shove boxes out the door and make enough dough to pay the rent and DP/MIS/IT deparments, on the other hand are applying the same rules that gave rise to M$ in the first place:
1) nobody ever got fired for buying IBM quickly followed by
2) nobody ever got fired for saving money which created the clones, and M$.

Usability was a secondary concern at the time. Remember all those books about DOS and the command line?

Visicalc opened the office door, Lotus 123 swept in followed by WordPerfect and M$ became an expert at ripping off other people's IP.

And nothing much has happened since except in niches like desktop publishing, graphics, (now Apple is doing it again with video editing,) email and the web which didn't depend on M$ in the first place.

Given the downward direction of the ROI and upward direction of the acquisition and support costs of an M$ box, M$ will disappear when Linux becomes just "good enough." Not even, uh, "Insanely Great," but just good enough.

OpenOffice, a free OS that any MSCE can install on existing boxes to extend their usable life (even by a single year,) and cheap site-wide licences will destroy M$ on the desktop almost as quickly as the switch to the x86 destroyed Digital Research, who never made it off the -80 architecture.

The switch to a new architecture on the server side is starting to worry M$ too since they have nothing real ported to it anyway. (NT in x86 emulation on the Itanium architecture? Naw, I think, we'll go Unix or Linux.)

I should be smelling fear from Redmond but since M$ has billions in the bank and can survive a change in course, in direction and in what sea they swim in, they won't disappear.