Mandriva Buys Assets from Lycoris

ulteus writes "For months after the acquisition of Conectiva, Mandriva moves further with the following announcement: "Mandriva today announced an agreement to purchase several assets from Lycoris, a major North American Linux distribution for home users. As part of this agreement, Lycoris' founder and CEO Joseph Cheek is joining Mandriva to develop a new and advanced Linux desktop product.". This is exciting for all Mandriva and Lycoris users, but I'm wondering: who's next?"

Comments

I see no problems with this

[justforaday]

I'm looking forward to having to explain why I have a CD labeled "Manlyca" laying around...

Maybe consolidation is good

[FlyByPC]

Perhaps what Linux needs to become competitive with Windows in the desktop-OS market is for several Red-Hat-like companies to come out with competing Linux desktop products. Once the way is paved (keeping it Open Source, of course), I think a critical mass will eventually make Linux or a similar Open Source project a no-brainer choice for the desktop.

Re:Maybe consolidation is good

[AKAImBatman]

Linux doesn't need consolidation as much as it just needs to address the existing usablility issues. I touched upon this in the Symphony OS story, and I hope to get a new blog entry up on it in the next day or two.

The long and short of it is:

1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.
2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.
4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.

If this can at least be solved at the distribution level, then we'll be good to go. But right now a given distribution means different things to different people depending on what packages are installed.

(P.S. Speaking of my blog, I get a kick out of the fact that the story I submitted on my last entry is still pending. Since Saturday. Guess the editors just think it's cool to look at or something. :-P)

Re:Maybe consolidation is good

[Coryoth]

1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.

It's actually pretty good at what it is - a means to package a diverse system that can be tailored to the user. Things like Smart (a Conectiva/Mandriva project even) and Autopackage help a lot. To get the packaging systems you want you need to fix #4, and I don't think that's likely to happen (at least not successfully).

2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.

Really? Any program that actually supports the freedesktop.org desktop entry file is readily accessible to the user unless they use some WM or DE that doesn't bother to use them - which means they've gone out of their way to complicate their lives. As for where the programs are stored on disk ... well, that doesn't really matter does it? You want a searchable tag/label based system, so why not consider the package database as such a label view - you can see all the programs on your system with ease through the "package label" view of your filesystem, does the physical location really matter that much to you?

3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.

To some extent I agree, but we're dealing with legacy here... even OS X and windows have some odd folder locations and names carried over. Besides, there's always GoboLinux, which I presume you already know about.

4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.

This is the big one really. If you want a fixed mandated core set of libraries that the user is forced to install... well, grab yourself a nice mandated controlled system like OS X, because Linux probably isn't what you're looking for. In theory you could just set up a distribution that has such a guaranteed base set of libraries, and in a sense some already exist - try Linspire, or Xandros. The catch is that people write applications for "Linux" not "Debian, stable" or "Linspire 3.1" or whatever. Given a random open source application it will make whatever assumptions about libraries it cares to - it's up to the packages to make sure those dependencies are met. FOSS applications tend to be coded against "whatever system the developer cared to use" rather than specific distributions and versions. Commercial developers maybe? Well they do have requirements - Oracle requires particular versions of Redhat in standard installs. Other commercial developers can do that if they like. Alternatively they could accept that the Linux world is a diverse world and restricting yourself to the one distribution that is guaranteed to have everything you want where you want it is a little limiting. You can always use Autopackage and handle the dependency issue elegantly in a way that's effectively invisible to the user.

The fact is that different distributions are different. You seem to be asking for all (or most) of the distributions to agree on a firm fixed set of base libraries. Distributions are different competing companies often however - you may as well ask Apple and Microsoft to hammer out a combined base set of libraries that you can be guaranteed to get in both OS X and Windows. Maybe that's a good idea. Maybe CoreImage on Windows and DirectX on OS X is what you'd like to see. I'm not so sure it will happen though.

Jedidiah.

typo

[ulteus]

"For months" -> "Four months". Sorry!

Consolidation of the commerical Linux vendors.

[CyricZ]

We are seeing the very same consolidation of the commercial Linux vendors that happened back in the late 1980s with commercial UNIX. Indeed, it will be interesting to see where this leads.

Mandriva?

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying out another Linux distro makes about as much sense as buying out a little girls' lemonade stand.

Lycoris Major Linux Distribution?

[StarWreck]

Since when is Lycoris a MAJOR Linux Distribution? I'm fammilar with and have personally installed and used Debian, Red-Hat, Gentoo, Slackware, Amiga-Linux, Fedora, SuSE, College-Linux, Mandrake, and Lindows/Linspire but I've never even heard of Lycoris before...

Re:Lycoris Major Linux Distribution?

[PenguinBoyDave]

You have not heard of Lycoris before because they are indeed not a major Linux player. I used them for a while, but the hardware support was lacking. Amazingly enough, their product had a strikingly similar look and feel to WindowsXP, but it never took off. When I did side-consulting, I tried to get about fifty of my customers who were looking at new computers to try Lycoris. forth-eight of them said "No" after taking it for a test drive. While it looked like Windows, it wasn't Windows, and that was what they wanted on their desktops. Sure...they bought a lot of Linux servers from me, but the desktops remained Windows.

As a Mandriva user...

[seanvaandering]

My recent upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1 is riddled with problems, will this aquisition actually change the distro, or do the people who download FREE versions of the distro get screwed? I noticed that some software in RPM format asks you for a disk you never got in the download version, its almost why I switched from Windows in the first place all over again!

Needless to say running this Distro in 128MB of RAM is not recommended. :)

New name speculation...

[mgkimsal2]

Mandrivis
Lydraktiva
Condraktivis
Mancortiva

I know you guys can come up with more!

Clitoris?

[Kevin Mitnick]

Oh.. sorry.. Lycoris.. Haven't had my dose of pr0n yet this morning. Gotta wait 'till the co-worker goes for coffee.

Might give it a whirl

[miletus]

I used Mandrake from version 7.2 up until 10.1. I found 10.1 to be problematic with various hardware, and 10.2 just impossible. So I switched to Ubuntu and everything works pretty well.

Since I still have a Mandrake club membership, I might give the new version a whirl, since the font rendering and desktop stuff from Lycoris looks interesting. I seriously doubt they'll get away from the bloated, buggy mess they've turned into.

Who?

[sben]

You're wondering "Who's next?". I'm wondering "Who?".

Re:ugh, marketing

[gbulmash]

I was going to say Corel Linux, but then remembered that's Xandros.

According to docs at the Lycoris site, they used to be called "Redmond Linux" and News Forge has a late 2001 review of a beta of Redmond Linux. Founded as Redmond Linux in 2000, they changed their name to Lycoris in January 2002.

Couldn't find a history to see what distro it might have originally forked from.

Greg

Who's Next

[ronark]

from the 'not-going-to-happen-in-this-lifetime dept.'

"Mandriva announced today that they are purchasing the majority of shares in Microsoft Corporation. What does this signify to the Linux community?"

Re:What's so exciting about it?

[toddbu]

Diversity is a great thing, but don't discount the value of standards. People want stuff that they can count on, and if Linux is really going to compete against Windows and the Mac then there needs to be a big push down that path. My ideal world is that there are a couple really big Linux vendors who cooperate on standards, and then a bunch of small guys doing customization for those who want/need it. The recent XFree86 fiasco shows that even an entrenched "vendor" can be booted pretty quickly if the community feels that their actions are counterproductive to the benefit of all.

Monopoly?

[pjwhite]

I think they're going to try to acquire all of them and create a monopoly on silly made-up company names.

Lycoris...

[MsGeek]

The base of Lycoris is...wait for it now...CALDERA OPEN LINUX. As in The SCO Group.

This was something that had to happen after the SCO v. IBM blowup sometime or another. I stopped recommending Lycoris to friends and family after the SCO lawsuit, and I suspect I was not alone. Poor Joe Cheek was stuck in the middle of all this.

Mandriva is a good distro, and Joe Cheek is a really good developer. He created a version of Linux that was really good for retraining people with Windows on the brain. Maybe Mandriva will do a "Mandriva Switch" sub-distro geared to the same audience as Lycoris.