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

application server An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a ...

called Enhydra Server through about 2005.

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. Initial venture capital funding of $10 million came in November 1999 from investors

Chase Capital Partners CCMP Capital is an American private equity investment firm that focuses on leveraged buyout and growth capital transactions. Formerly known as JP Morgan Partners, the investment professionals of JP Morgan Partners separated from JPMorgan Chase o ...

and Chase H&Q (formerly Hambrecht & Quist). A second round for a total of $15 million, announced in February 2000, included TransCosmos USA, and the Intel 64 Fund. On August 23, 2000, an additional $16 million in funding was announced from Compaq and NEC. Presidents included David H. Young and Yancy Lind. The names were puns on ''Enhydra lutris'', the scientific name for the

sea otter The sea otter (''Enhydra lutris'') is a marine mammal native to the coasts of the northern and eastern North Pacific Ocean. Adult sea otters typically weigh between , making them the heaviest members of the weasel family, but among the small ...

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").

Enhydra Server

Enhydra Server was a Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE)

that was used for most Lutris-developed sites (including the Customatix project). In January 1999 Lutris created an open-source software community of related projects including Enhydra Server. In October 1999, Lutris announced their intention to develop Enhydra Server v4 as a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server (later to be known as Enhydra Enterprise) available as open source software. There was considerable press interest in whether this was compatible with

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

' licensing model for Java EE, which was distributed under the Sun Community Source License (SCSL). In March 2000, Lutris announced a commercial, boxed Enhydra Server product including support. In late 1999, Lutris had purchased InstantDB, a Java

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...

distributed on a free-for-non-commercial-use basis developed Peter Hearty and a company called ICS. Lutris announced their intent to distribute InstantDB as open-source. Enhydra Enterprise made its first beta release in April 2001. It was implemented with the JOnAS technology. Intel published a reference architecture for the software. 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. Many community participants migrated to the fledgling JBoss project.

The end

After the dot-com bubble burst, nearly all Lutris staff were laid off in waves from late 2001 to early 2002. By April it was down from a high of about 190 employees in three buildings, to eight. 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 Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from co ...

. In April 2002, ObjectWeb, now known as the OW2 Consortium, took over hosting of Enhydra Server and Enhydra Enterprise. In November 2003, the German company Together Teamlösungen 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

External links

* {{Cite web , title= Official website , url= http://lutris.com/ , url-status=dead , archiveurl= https://web.archive.org/web/20020325170339/http://lutris.com/ , archivedate= March 25, 2002 , accessdate= August 25, 2013 Defunct software companies of the United States Software companies established in 1995 Software companies disestablished in 2005 Companies based in Santa Cruz County, California 1995 establishments in California 2005 disestablishments in California