Lycoris

» see lycoris.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Joseph Cheek started Redmond Linux Corporation in 2000, having come out of Linuxcare, and ran it from Washington state. In June 2001 it merged with a California outfit called deepLinux, and that December it shipped its first finished product, a release codenamed Amethyst, at $19.95 with the price due to rise in the new year. The pitch was the one every consumer Linux company made between 1999 and 2006: an operating system your relatives could install without you on the phone.

What made this one briefly real was retail. Fry's Electronics took it in May 2002 across twenty stores in four states, which for a desktop Linux distribution was an actual shelf in an actual shop. That October, Walmart's website started selling it preinstalled on nine Microtel PCs starting around $228, and Time ran a piece naming it the best bet among Linux desktops. A boxed copy was $29.95 with sixty days of email support.

The scale underneath the press was small. By 2005 there were about twenty thousand paying members, with downloads suggesting a few hundred thousand users in total. There was no venture money. The company was essentially Cheek, funded partly out of his own pocket, with a core group of volunteers around him.

Desktop Linux was a category I actually lived in, as an engineering student around 2004, when a spare partition was how you learned what an operating system was. The part I never had was this part. Boxed Linux at a checkout counter was a North American retail phenomenon, and in Turkey the distributions arrived the way everything arrived, over the wire and on burned discs, with nobody's cardboard around them.

~ the record ~

~ shedding Redmond ~

On 19 January 2002 Redmond Linux Corp. became Lycoris and Redmond Linux Personal became Desktop/LX. The company gave its reasons in the release: it wanted a trademarkable product name, and one that would travel to resellers outside the United States. Cheek's own line was that the change would let them shed the connotations of being a software publisher in Redmond, Washington.

There is a story that circulates saying the name changed because Microsoft sued. I could find it only in a mailing-list post from late 2002 with nothing behind it, and the company's own stated reasons do not mention a dispute, so it stays out of this.

~ 15 June 2005 ~

Mandriva, which had been Mandrakesoft until a few months earlier, announced on 15 June 2005 that it had agreed to purchase several assets from Lycoris. Cheek joined Mandriva to head the program. The wording in the release matters: assets, not the company. Mandriva wanted the desktop work and Cheek's expertise in it, and said the two product lines would converge into something for the autumn. Gaël Duval described the arithmetic of the combination as one plus one making three.

Desktop/LX 1.4 had already shipped in August 2004 and no version followed it. Sometime between July and September 2005 the homepage put up a Gold Edition, which bundled the existing release with extras and announced itself, accurately, as the last edition of Desktop/LX ever. The site served that page into September 2005. By the time the archive looks again, in April 2006, lycoris.com is a redirect to mandriva.com, and it has been somebody else's property ever since. Today the domain is simply for sale.

~ what this one was for ~

The consumer desktop Linux companies of this period all lost, and they lost to the same two things: hardware that shipped with Windows already on it, and the fact that the people best served by a cheaper operating system were the least equipped to judge one. Lycoris got further into physical retail than most of them and had the smallest company behind it. Twenty thousand people paid a man in Washington for an operating system, which is not a market, but it is more than nothing.

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