Lutris CEO Yancy Lind has announced on the Enhydra mailing lists that Lutris has decided to "stop selling application servers". Lutris is effectivly dropping its commercial Enhydra and EAS products, and is shifting gears towards new product development. Significant layoffs are also reported to have accompanied these product drops.

From the Lutris newsgroups:
----------------------
Subject: Re: Enhydra: no more EAS - now what?
From: "Yancy Lind" <yancy dot lind at lutris dot com>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 15:17:07 -0800
List-Archive: <http://www.enhydra.org/project/mailingLists/enhydra/maillist.html>

I am sorry to say that it is true that Lutris has decided to stop selling application servers to end users. We will no longer offer commercial versions of Enhydra or EAS. This should make no impact on any of you open source users. Enhydra.org and the projects it contains will not be impacted.

Lutris is going to go back into a development mode and take the significant technology we have developed over the past few years and reposition ourselves in a new market. We have no plans of announcing any of these new products for some time. We currently have no plans make any new donations to Enhydra.org. I encourage anyone looking for an open source J2EE application server to get JBOSS.

Lutris.com will be updated to reflect these changes shortly.

Best wishes to you all.

Yancy Lind
CEO, Lutris Technologies

Does enhydra.org stay the same? Keep going?

From their website it looks like they have simply packed up and left.
http://www.lutris.com/.

It's too bad in a way... Their EAS App server wasn't so great, but they did have a lot of other cool technology on the Enhydra.org site. It looks like it's going to to stay, but people are wary of contributing to the code because they fear what Lutris will do with the innovations. It's amazing, because about a year ago at this time, Lutris was being viewed very favorably as an Open source J2EE server in the press. But when they started going back on a lot of their commitments to the Enhydra community (for valid reasons or otherwise), they lost a lot of ground. It wasn't too hard to see this one coming.

Lutris engendered a lot of ill will due to their handling of the "open source" Enhydra and the InstantDB database. I'm hoping that at least the Zeus data binding project survives, as it's got a lot of potential.

FWIW...

Donnie

XMLC & Barracuda aren't bad either, especially now that they are moving away from those horrible make files and towards Ant instead.

I think a lot of the problem came from the open source policies of the Java Community Process. I some ways Lutris was forced into going to a closed source model because the J2EE license does not allow open sourcing. We are hoping that the recent announcement between Sun and Apache moves forward in an aggressive fashion and does not place contingencies on allowing open source implementations of Java API's.

Bob Bickel
HP Middleware

Concerning the advice for another Open Source server application, I would rather encourage people to download JOnAS from the Objectweb consortium (http://www.objectweb.org/) as Lutris based their EAS product on this Opens Source Application Server.
The migration should be easier and it is still Open Source :-)

I hope Lutris will be contributing the tools they added in EAS to the Objectweb consortium as Open Source instead of simply trashing all their work.

--
Mickaël Rémond