Cygnus Solutions - Wikipedia





	
	

	
	

	Cygnus Solutions

	
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Cygnus Solutions	Industry	Computer software
	Fate	Merged with Red Hat
	Successor	Red Hat
	Founded	1989; 32 years ago (1989)
	Defunct	2000; 21 years ago (2000)
	Key people
	John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann, and David Henkel-Wallace
	Products	Compilers, debuggers, development tools, eCos, Cygwin


Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software.  Its tagline was: Making free software affordable.

For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were the maintainers of several key GNU software products, including the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils (which included the GNU Assembler and Linker).  It was also a major contributor to the GCC project and drove the change in the project's management from having a single gatekeeper to having an independent committee.  Cygnus developed BFD, and used it to help port GNU to many architectures, in a number of cases working under non-disclosure to produce tools used for initial bringup of software for a new chip design.

Cygnus was also the original developer of Cygwin, a POSIX layer and the GNU toolkit port to the Microsoft Windows operating system family, and of eCos, an embedded real-time operating system.

In the 2001 documentary film Revolution OS, Tiemann indicates that the name "Cygnus" was chosen from among several names that incorporated the acronym "GNU". According to Stan Kelly-Bootle, it was recursively defined as Cygnus, your GNU Support.[1]

On November 15, 1999, Cygnus Solutions announced its merger with Red Hat, and it ceased to exist as a separate company in early 2000.[2] As of 2007[update], a number of Cygnus employees continue to work for Red Hat, including Tiemann, who serves as Red Hat's Vice President of Open Source Affairs, and formerly served as CTO.


References[edit]


	^ Binstock, Andrew (2014-04-22). "Farewell, Devil's Advocate". Dr. Dobb's Journal. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2019-08-18. (NB. The article refers to and cites from Stan Kelly-Bootle's original article "FAQs of Life" in the "Devil's Advocate" column of UNIX Review, July 1994, where CYGNUS is recursively defined as "Cygnus, your GNU Support".)

	^ 
"Red Hat To Acquire Cygnus and Create Global Open Source Powerhouse". Red Hat. November 15, 1999. Retrieved 2019-08-18.





External links[edit]

	
Tiemann, Michael (January 1999), "Future of Cygnus Solutions — An Entrepreneur's Account", Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.
	
"Marketing Cygnus Support", Free Software history, Toad, September 27, 2006.



	Free and open-source software portal










Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cygnus_Solutions&oldid=996545286"


		Categories: 	Free software companies
	Red Hat
	Software companies disestablished in 2000
	Software companies established in 1989


Hidden categories: 	Articles needing additional references from September 2014
	All articles needing additional references
	Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2007
	All articles containing potentially dated statements




	




	





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		 This page was last edited on 27 December 2020, at 06:32 (UTC).
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