LSP bought by chinese LED company

[MrChristmas2000]

 

I was tempeted to use the 

[urthegman]

Support for???

The title of the thread says LSP, so that should give you a clue....

You can be as vague as you like, but searching over at LSP all I could see from the grand total of 5 posts(as a guest) over there is that you built two controller boards and wanted/expected to use a protocol that you also wrote yourself with LSP and that you wanted the demo period extended. So now I know exactly what you didn't get support for and understand why, thanks.

[ebrady]

You can be as vague as you like, but searching over at LSP all I could see from the grand total of 5 posts(as a guest) over there is that you built two controller boards and wanted/expected to use a protocol that you also wrote yourself with LSP and that you wanted the demo period extended. So now I know exactly what you didn't get support for and understand why, thanks.

Wow...

Since this is a hobby focused towards the happiness and good-will of the holiday season, I will take the high road and ignore the fact that you are calling me a liar.  I have never met you in person, so I will also refrain from forming any character judgements about you.

To clarify your understanding, it may help if you did a few things....

1. Look at the date of the posts you mentioned, they happened back at the time I when I indicated that I had good support.
2. Realize that I just purchased an upgrade to LSP v2.0, advanced license, and that I might need support for importing my existing Vixen sequences.  (See my signature... I have been using Vixen).
3. Re-read my first post to this thread which indicates that I am having problems accessing the LSP website.
4. Ask yourself how it would be possible for me to make a new post to the LSP forums, if my account complains about having insufficient permissions?
5. Ask yourself why my account account worked fine in the past but does not now?
6. Ask yourself what a reasonable amount of time to wait for an admin or someone from LSP is to answer an e-mail requesting support to fix my account.
7. Ask yourself what may have changed at LSP? 

This is my final post on this subject as these types of flame posts are not really in the spirit of what this hobby is all about I prefer to keep things positive.  You can PM me if you feel the need to discuss further...

[t.jo13]

 I have an interesting  question  why did they buy it?

[smeighan]

I have an interesting  question  why did they buy it?

i can only speculate. This company contacted me 2-3 months ago wanting to use the nutcracker. I dont know if they still have the same vision but we were talking about something like a Mr Christmas on Steroids. Consumer picks various hardware (sold by them) that will be driven by a controller and turn all of this into a wonderful christmas display. They have a nationwide distribution channel and factories back in china. i think they see an opportunity to expand into the consumer market. They wanted to use nutcracker to sequence their hardware, i told them nutcracker was not really the right vehicle. they needed something that is a sequencer more like vixen or lsp.

this may have nothing to do with what they want

[rrowan]

Hi folks,

Please keep all comments on a friendly level or topic can be locked. 

If you feel upset by something then please take a short break and come back happy.

Thanks

Rick R.

[caretaker]

Put yourself in Davids shoes, you create a specialty piece of software that hundreds of people like and buy but not enough to allow you to quit your day job. So now your work a eight hour day and then have to work another six to eight hours on programming and taking care of customers. Then along comes a company that offers to buy your program but wants to keep you in charge of programming and development. This allows you to hand over all the day to day to stuff to someone else and you just have to do the programming plus get paid for your time. Like RJ is doing with the commercial version of the express this could be a good thing and what I have seen from Minleon USA regarding the purchase I don't see anything to worry about, but time will tell.  Also as to the sale in most cases in this type of business transaction there is nothing (news wise) released from either company to the sale is finalized.

[kevinpickett]

Companies do not buy other companies for the joy of it.  There was something in LSP that they wanted to use to improve their current situation.  Lets be honest about all this.  LSP is a niche company, (and a very good one at that), but a very small niche.  And since LSP doesn't have the distribution channels, some patent, or some other technology that is not unique to this market.  We can only assume that Minleon wanted the rights to use the code from LSP to better their equipment or to introduce a new product.  Purchasing LSP was the best advantage for them whether is was due to time or money, but they felt that the LSP code would be their best choice.  This is solely based on my experience in the corporate buy outs and the small companies being bought out by larger ones. Minleon did not buy LSP to continue to sell it to hobbyist and to do business as usual. I doubt their CEOs sat around and said Lets get into the lighting software business and take on LOR.  They wanted the code to use in their existing products and/or to build new ones that can benefit from Daves code. 

I'm sure for the next several years we can count on LSP v2.5 to be around and supported. We can only hope that in the mid term, 3 or more yrs down the road, that Minion does not decide to kill the LightShow Pro product as a stand alone application and that they continue to make it available to end users.  Only time will tell. But we can be sure that the LSP code, in whole or in part,  will be used in other products manufactured by Minleon.  Minleon bought LSP for their benefit, not ours. I'v seen too many good software packages be striped and used in other products and the original application die.  Its up to us now to remind Minleon of how important this software is to the lighting community and encourage them not to let the stand alone software program to die over the years.   And who knows maybe Minleon will get into the software business and improve and continue to grow LightShow Pro as a hobbyist light control software.

[taybrynn]

Well said. 

I think the good part is the LSP already has support of more hardware and protocols than anything else on the market and even if they add proprietary minleon support going forward, the foundation to support us is already there. 

They might even opt to split the software into a professional product that competes with Madrix, etc ... and then the existing LSP product which ranges from entry level to pro-sumer grade depending on license.

Who knows.  I just know as has already been mentioned that David hasn't had much of payday for all the years and hours he's put into this.  They guy needs to pay the bills like the rest of us ... and he either sells it and finally gets a payday worth remembering ... or he continues to struggle with the real job and doing LSP on the side and never quite getting the critical mass due to limited market here.  I give David credit for finally addressing the core issues of LSP the last couple years and having a real test team involved to fix the things which were tainting the software previously.