Cygnus Solutions
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 1989 |
| Founder | John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann, David Henkel-Wallace |
| Defunct | 2000 |
| Fate | Merged with Red Hat |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Michael Tiemann (Co-founder, later VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat) |
| Products | GNU Debugger, GNU Binutils, GCC development support, BFD, Cygwin, eCos |
Cygnus Solutions, initially known as Cygnus Support, was established in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann, and David Henkel-Wallace to offer commercial assistance for free software. Their motto was: Making free software affordable.
The staff at Cygnus managed essential GNU software projects, such as the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils, which encompassed the GNU Assembler and Linker. The firm played a significant role in the development of the GCC and facilitated its governance shift from a single overseer to an autonomous committee. Additionally, Cygnus created the BFD, which supported GNU adaptations across various hardware platforms, occasionally under non-disclosure contracts for emerging processor designs.
Cygnus was also responsible for creating Cygwin, a POSIX compatibility layer and port of GNU tools tailored for the Microsoft Windows operating systems, as well as developing eCos, an embedded real-time operating system.
In the 2001 film Revolution OS, Tiemann described that the name "Cygnus" was selected from options containing "GNU," such as "magnum" and "wingnut." According to Stan Kelly-Bootle, it was defined recursively as Cygnus, your GNU Support.
On November 15, 1999, Cygnus declared its merger with Red Hat, leading to the company's dissolution as an independent entity by early 2000. By 2007, multiple former Cygnus team members remained with Red Hat, including Tiemann, who held the position of Vice President of Open Source Affairs and previously served as CTO.
External links
- Future of Cygnus Solutions — An Entrepreneur's Account by Michael Tiemann, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, January 1999
- Marketing Cygnus Support, Free Software history, Toad, September 27, 2006