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Red Hat Buying Cygnus?
Ok guys, this is purely a rumor, but its one that I've heard from several points on the globe so I'm gonna share it:
Vulture Capitalist writes "I just got out of a meeting with Matthew Szulick and it appears as though Red Hat has inked a deal to buy Cygnus. In related news- we also understand that some people at Red Hat were so upset with the acquisition and it's corporate implications that they have decided to resign from their Sr. management (founding) positions. After the failed acquisition attempts with both Linuxcare and TurboLinux- this should prove to be a very interesting deal. I'm personally looking forward to the annual report! " Again, none of this is any more than rumor, but I've caught wind of it from several spots so I figure its worth sharing. What's interesting is that Cygnus has more employees then Red Hat, and actually generates more revenue.
s their going to be some change in the attitude toward open-source?
A better question might be 'how will it affect red hat linux?' I see nothing fundamentally wrong with red hat continuing its dedication to open source through linux, and operating in a more conventional, proprietary environment for other software, at least in the short term. Obviously I'd like to see everything go open source, but I'm not going to jump on the anti-red-hat bandwagon if they don't do it immediately.
...how long has the deal been in the works?
I ask, because many of you probably remember the "name the company" contest Cygnus had a while back. It was rumoured that they wanted to change it because of 1.) a lower neccessity to emphasize "GNU" (cyGNUs), and 2.) because they'd been considering an IPO, whereas there's a Cygnus Pharmaceuticals already.
This said, a while back, the outcome of the contest -- an indefinite delay -- was announced. In this light, such seems fairly interesting.
Then again, I just might have seen one too many X-Files episodes. But I do find the resignation of senior management interesting as well.
RedHat's Market cap is at around $7 Billion now. It has nothing resembling prospects of earning that kind of money any time soon so the logical thing to do is buy up some other companies that make a lot of money but have small or none existent market caps.
:). Turbo Linux is good.
The greatest barrier is that a clash of cultures is dangerous and buying up something that's practically dead is almost suicidal.
In other words, Corel is risky. SCO is bad. Cignus is good. Linuxcare would do wonders for RedHat's reputation
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Red Hat and Cygnus are in vertical, software-only markets, so a buyout or merge makes sense. Cygnus' major markets are the embedded space, GCC/tools customizations and GCC development. Red Hat is doing all the software work orthogonal to that: kernel development and packaging/maintainance/support. It's ridiculous to suggest that this could create any kind of monopoly, both companies are writing software under the GPL - if users are unsatisfied with any product they can take it and go a different path. Just like Mandrake does. If this deal proves to be true then there will be interesting times ahead!
RedHat has more money then any distrib, and
all it's work is GPL'd, so this is no problem
for Debian, SuSe, etc.
It would actually bring more developers into
RedHat, and just imagine what is in store.
They have done nothing against the community,
yet every one says "Next MS".
Has anyone compared there market sizes?!?!?
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CodeRed, the lower user #. No relation to SirCam.
Cygnus has been in trouble recently -- the outcome oftheir "name the company" contest suggests that they weren't financially strong enough to IPO. Getting acquired makes good sense there.
RedHat, by contrast, has the advantage of a delusionally high market cap that is buying power today but could be gone the moment the market comes to its senses. Making an acquisition makes good sense.
What it does signal is an agressive position for RedHat -- Cygnus isn't a Linux company, their expertise is more general Un*x and IDE/compatibility stuff. That jives with RedHat trying to push Linux as the Un*x of the future -- they need to build or buy more expertise in that direction.
In my view -- this would be good for RedHat, good for Cyngus, good for Linux, and probably seriously bad news for all the other Unices (eunuchs?) on the block.
--G
I think this is a sad sign: if true, with this deal, Red Hat has shown that they are not confident about their own business strategy. Now they compensate for this by buying up other (profitable) companies.
I don't see what the benefit is for the public.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
No, RedHat will not become a monopoly. Their core system cannot be owned and controlled by them. Do you suppose that you could buy a copy of NT, make some changes, resell it, and compete against Microsoft?
That's what Mandrake did, as well as many others. I'm thinking of two guys still in high school getting rave reviews for their distro. The mere fact that these guys can do what they are doing shows that Red Hat will never enjoy monopoly power. Remember, monopoly power doesn't necessarily mean market share. Red Hat will get to be a big company, but never a monopoly.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Cygnus makes:
* The GNUPro development toolkit
* ECOS, an embedded operating system (designed to work with GNUPro)
* The Cygwin Posix-compatibilty environment for Windows
* Other development tools (eg. Code Fusion, Source Navigator)
AFAIK, their real revenue stream is in consulting, particularly for embedded systems developers. Check out their website: http://www.cygnus.com.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Um, I think that Cygwin 1.0 was actually just the 20.1 beta packaged together in a CD with a bunch of other stuff. It's still available online as free software, because it was all licensed under the GPL. Don't worry, it's still free.
// The Liquid Plumber - www.stf.org/~drano/
They are very strong supporters of many Free Software development projects, most notably gcc, GNOME and Docbook.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I've seen a lot of posts saying "Who's cygnus?" While I don't know the company especially well, I thought I'd make a quick post of some of what I do know.
;)
Cygnus has been around since the dawn of time. err.. Well, the late 80's anyway. Basically, they were founded to provide commercial support for the GNU project. Their biggest area of involvement has been in the compilers.
As nearly as I can tell, Cygnus makes most of their money from consulting, support contract for GNU stuff, and porting GCC to processor platforms for various vendors (e.g. Intel).
EGCS is a cygnus project. I think glibc is as well. They have produced a version of the GNU development suite called "GNUPro" which includes some moderately enhanced stuff. They have produced their own Real Time operating system called Ecos (if I remember right). They have produced a complete port of all the GNU stuff to Windows called "Cyg-Win" which they sell for $99.
When Linux came out, they blew it off. Now look at 'em
-- Slashdot sucks.
Consider that, without fail, every Linux distro and application, even the kernel, uses gcc. And Cygnus are the acknowledged world experts on gcc. So, if improvements can be made to gcc that make it 10% faster, then suddenly Linux is 10% faster!
On another note, one of the big things Linux needs to do is improve the quality and availability of "easy" development tools. Cygnus has a background in that area as well (although they are not necessarily the best). I know they've already done some work on precompiled headers and so forth.
Given Redhat's record of contributing back to the community, I think this could be a really good thing for Linux as a whole.
Go Redhat!
-- Slashdot sucks.
Check out this rumor on Slashdot
3 222
by: cyguy2000
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/10/082
No movement in CYGN's stock though, except for
the higher than average volume yesterday.
Beware, CYGN is not the Cygnus we're talking about here; CYGN does pharmaceuticals. Don't be taken in. In the meantime, could somebody please provide the real stock symbol for Cygnus software, or confirm that it isn't publically traded.
I believe what was meant was 'if they could suddenly make the compiler generate code which ran 10% faster, then Linux would be 10% faster'.
:-)
As for the effect of RHAT buying Cygnus, the one thing that would be a little more likely is that while profiling an inefficient portion of code, it would now be feasible to work directly with the compiler team to generate faster code.
As for IDE's, I prefer vim
In April 1999, the egcs steering committee was appointed by the FSF as the official GNU maintainer for GCC. At that time GCC was renamed from the "GNU C Compiler" to the "GNU Compiler Collection". From http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html
Will Red Hat start using anti-competitive and illegal practices to force people to sell/bundle/preload/use their products?
Probably not.
-Brent--
-- Slashdot sucks.
This is a no-brainer. You're Red Hat, you've just been infused with tons of capital, you want to do things to improve the market penetration of Linux. How better to do this than to buy up the key Linux development tools vendor?
How many of you who are worried that RH are trying to become the Microsoft of Linux have considered what might happen if Borland repeat their 1980s DOS compiler coup on Linux? Before Borland's Turbo Pascal came along, a decent DOS compiler couldn't be had for less than several hundred to one thousand dollars; TP rolled out at ~$75 a pop, took the compiler market by storm. Suddenly, everybody was using TP to develop DOS apps. What if Borland's Linux compilers took the Linux market by storm and left Cygnus in the dust? How many of you would be complaining that RH weren't doing anything to preserve Cygnus and leaving us at the mercy of Borland?
Like it or not, the future of Linux involves NASDAQ, venture caps, and lots and lots of money. Technologies like "egcs" and embedded development tools that are important to the future of Linux will be acquired. What we should be asking ourselves is not, "Is it a good thing that someone may buy out Cygnus?" but "Which company would we prefer to take the reins at Cygnus? Turbo? Caldera? Red Hat? Microsoft?" I'd prefer that Red Hat end up with Cygnus since they've demonstrated that they are dedicated to the GNU concept. Some other vendors seem all too willing to market closed add-ons to Linux and would probably hurt Linux if they had control of Cygnus.
Right now, the Linux development tools space is where it's at, and this would seem like a wise move on Red Hat's part.
slashdot broke my sig
This hypothesis just doesn't seem to fit the facts.
P.S. If you follow the link to WRS above, either disable cookies, or disable "Warn me before accepting cookies". WRS's server is very cookie-happy.
www.eFax.com are spammers
PICO??? good god. Use teco like us real men. EMACS AND VI SUCK, TECO FOREVER!!! (For those newbies who just "discovered" unix thanks to linux, teco is what inspired edlin. before such blasphemous tools like vi or emacs.)
Ok,
If it's true, good for them, they need apps. And, I think that buying key companies that make Linux cool is good.
On the other hand, I would have loved to see them buy VMWare and open source whatever they can in it!
Of course, these bought companies should be independent divisions of redhat that keep their name and employees etc....
The kernel needs a Gtk/Gnome-based post-install device configuration tools "a la" make xconfig. (Better sig coming soon
They have a couple of proprietary products, but I doubt they make them much money.
So I don't think this would affect Red Hat much. Maybe they would make the proprietary Cygnus products free software, that would not cost them much.
They maintain binutils and gdb for the FSF. They are the single largest contributer to gcc, and the head of the gcc team is a Cygnus employee.
Their main revenue comes from selling support for gcc (and the GNU tools) to various makers of embedded devices, including ports to new hardware.
They have started selling boxed packages, such as GnuPRO, CodeFusion, and Cygwin. GnuPRO and Cygwin are just packeded versions of free tools, CodeFusion is proprietary.
You can read all about Cygnus and its free software business plan from Michael Tiemann's chapter of "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" (aka The Book that Slashdot Made).
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Xenu loves you!
The only non-free software on the CD is the install program. This means that you can install it on as many platforms you want, and that you can put all the software (except the install program) on ftp if that is what you want. Free speach, not free beer.
It is *not* just b20.1, but a later version.
It's just that the FSF are legally cautious and don't want to face copyright infringement lawsuits later on. When you assign copyright to them, they promise to make the code available under a free licence (there is a form somewhere, I don't know where though).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What a sorry bunch of FUD!
Linux made it to the big tent without NASDAQ and will continue regardless of NASDAQ. It shows an atrocious misunderstanding of free source software to say otherwise. It simply can't be hijacked.
Suppose Borkland did release a killer IDE for Linux. Further suppose Borkland did intentionally make it incompatible with everything that exists now. How many free source developers would actually release code that *required* such a beast? Can you imagine a distribution that came with sources (as required by the GPL) yet couldn't be built except with the Borkland IDE?
You have got to be sleeping poorly to come up with any such scenario.
Like it or not, free source software CANNOT be hijacked.
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Infuriate left and right
Outlook 2000 is a very streamlined program. Redesigned from the ground up, I can't remember ever having it crash on me.
Visual Studio 6.0 is another great one. This is probably my favorite Windows program (aside from my DVD player). It doesn't crash and, although KDevelop is quite kickass, there really isn't any IDE out there as good as VS6.
So I guess what I'm saying is that Microsoft's applications are actually pretty good. It's their operating systems the bite.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."