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It's Official: Red Hat Buys Cygnus
Well, now it's official. Red Hat buys Cygnus for $674 Million. (Short story here.) I'm sure we're going to see lots of attention from the media in the following hours. What do you think?
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I think that with the commitment that Redhat has shown to the community, this can only benefit. Cygnus gives Redhat a great technology portfolio, and provided redhat continues their trend of making their contribution free, we shoudl see some cool new things for linux from this...
five fingers make a fist amalgamate and resist
Despite being a Linux enthusiast, most of my customers demand Windows NT versions of nearly everything I write. Cygwin has been invaluable in allowing me to write high quality *nix software and provide a running version on NT (relatively painlessly).
I'm most interested in Red Hat's continued support for these Cygnus projects.
This is great news!! Hopefully, g++ -o hello hello.cpp will generate a 10 KB code!
Personally, I think it's a good move for Red Hat -- they're protecting their interests by ensuring they don't lose their development toolchain, which is pretty critical to their survival.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with the parts of Cygnus that aren't related to their core Linux business, though. I think there are huge opportunities for Red Hat in the embedded space now, but I wonder if they're too Linux server oriented to see them...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
There's a FAQ up on the Cygnus site regarding the merger.
Most interestingly (perhaps) is that a new CEO will be taking the helm at RedHat.
Check the Press Release on www.redhat.com about the whole deal. There is some good information as well as a nice FAQ on it.
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Anyone have any more information on the rumours of senior RedHat people leaving?
since Cygnus certainly don't share all their products with the community.It'll be interesting to see what happens to this quote on About RedHat:
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
> I'd love to see some of their development
:-)
> tools and innovations folded back into
> gcc/egcs et al...
But Cygnus already _have_ been folding their work back into EGCS: who do you think has been maintaining all that stuff for the last bundle of years? Anyone who uses gcc or gdb is heavily indebted to their work on it.
Their tool stuff (development environments, class browsers, etc), is a whole different thing, and I'd love to see that open sourced, but this is (and should remain) a totally separate thing to the compiler itself. I'd hate to see them go down the MS route of tying it all into one megalithic package. Did you know that the MSVC class browser depends on a special browser database that is generated for it by the compiler? Urgh. Works great, up until the day you want to use some different compiler for a change
They seem to have been quite a good company - cranking out free software and working most notably on egcs I think.
If redhat buys them, it's because they see the value in the company. Let's just hope that redhat doesn't mess with success and lets them continue to do what they're good at and what made them attractive to redhat in the first place.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
As far as I can tell, it worked really well for microsoft. Incidentally, it has worked REALLY well for Cisco. It didn't work too well for AOL, but as a general rule acquiring companies that have already developed useful applications in your market space is a good way to grow your business.
If Red Hat follows in the footsteps of Microsoft when it comes to growing your business, we should all be relatively happy as the (open source) product line becomes more robust and feeds more good code (and paid coders) into the community.
cheers.
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
Why would we want to destroy Cygnus?
The way I see it, Red Hat and Cygnus are a great match - Red Hat builds the OS, Cygnus builds development tools and embedded systems.
With both working together, it's far easier to coordinate, so both sides will profit.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Actually, it's a good idea to become a one-stop. It means that your customers can come to you for all their needs and be confident that all of your particular configurations will work smoothly together out of the box. That's why OEMs who sell the OS and their hardware seperately never caught on.
This is a case of seeing the best road and taking it. If you have to emulate the way MS does something (so long as its not something like RedHat crushing Debian by threatening OEMs), so be it -- the MS folks are obviously bang-up business guys; they didn't make their money by being good coders.
Additionally: Stop comparing Red Hat to Microsoft. RH is in a position where they could start bullying, but they don't. They deserve some sort of recognition for that, not more flames. Just because you're the biggest kid on the block doesn't automatically make you a bully.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"who do you think has been maintaining all that stuff for the last bundle of years? Anyone who uses gcc or gdb is heavily indebted to their work on it.
"
If there's one thing I don't ever feel towards a commerical organisation, it's indebted. Unless maybe I steal their goods. That's the whole point of the business transaction. Now, if we are talking about a whole new business ethic, where people purchase from a company not just for a positive ROI, but for reasons such as moral support, strategic alignment and so on, then that's very interesting, but it's not at all obvious.
Every day I go to small butchers and bakers and get a worse ROI on my cash than if I go to the supermarket. That's because I morally prefer small shops and I'm willing to keep them in business even when I'm forced to agree that they basically offer a worse product at a higher price than in the local Waitrose.
However, I struggle to apply that way of thinking to RedHat. A typical US startup, full of geeks and suits and cash. Great, best of luck to them, but these aren't people I talk to on mailing lists - they aren't part of my community, and I don't feel like being charitable. I'm 100% not indebted to RH for anything.
I'm all in favour of making purchasing decisions based on more than a cold calculation of product ability versus product TCO, but RedHat is not behaving like that kind of company. I'm looking forward to seeing how these OSS business models end up...
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Here is my list of companies RedHat shouldn't buy ( not buying anybody isn't an option when you are overvalued as they are ).
:).
1 : VA. Stay out of the Linux on iNTEL hardware business. More money in working with people who do that. Don't want RedHat Linux to go the way of OS/2 now
2 : LinuxCare. Partner with Linux support companies don't buy them.
3 : SCO. Very tempting, but repeat after me. "A culture clash will make all the good programers quit".
4 : Troll Tech. This is an eggshell and we don't want it broken. Let them do QT under the QPL at there own pace.
Now my list of companies to buy.
1. Corel. Go for it, they make closed software that should stay closed so buy them up and keep a hands off approach; "It's not us it's the "Corel Division'". Best of all they are grossly undervalued.
2. Borland/Imprise. MS got to be what it is buy building the best dev tools and practically giving them away at crucial stages. You could force them heavily into Linux.
3. ISPs. Buy as many as you can get. You need to keep the cash streams pumping without disturbing the core business.
4. SGI. Another money stream just waiting to be taped. Eat them up but don't try to manage them.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't think mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations are inherently evil. My problems with Microsoft are not (entirely) becuase they are big and successful (of course I do have a certain amount of animosity towards their success, everyone likes an underdog, nobody likes the top dog, but I try not to let that cloud my thinking). Microsoft's evil arises from their abuse of their OS market dominance. Because they "control the desktop," their give-away of IE with the OS that one needs to have (or at least most people think they need to have) was nothing but a blatant attempt to use their market power to crush Netscape, which did pose a real threat to MS's dominance.
RedHat has not (up to this point) behaved like that. While they have become the big boy on the Linux block, they have steadfastly held to their open source roots. Everything they've done has been GPL'd back for anyone to use. Look at all the RPM-based distros, for example.
I happen to use Debian because I'm a bit of a free software purist, so I'm leery of RedHat because it contains some licensed commercial code. Still, so long as RedHat continues to contribute open code, then more power to them.
The measure of RedHat's "evilness" will come with what they do as they buy these other guys (hey, what happened with the "rename cygnus server giveaway," BTW?). If they leave Cygnus' stuff closed and bundle it with RedHat, well, that will be sad, because they will have missed an opportunity to "raise all boats."
If they give away the code, then the buyout was a win for us all.
Also, again, while I spurn RedHat personally for selling some non-free code with their product, you have to give them credit for being a leading light for good. IIRC, Alan Cox is paid handsomely by RedHat. Next to Linus himself, Alan is probably the most important person in Linux kernel development, and, as the principal maintainer of the stable kernel series, he is one of the biggest contibutors to the success of ALL of Linux.
Alan's not the only one on RedHat's payroll either. We all benefit when hackers of all stripes are able to make a living writing free code. As long as RedHat keeps doing these right things, they should be respected and appreciated. Note I don't mean they shouldn't be criticized! RedHat has to expect some of that as the price of openness. But until RedHat starts openly acting against the interest of free software (which is different from bundling non-free code; I guess I see Debian-style DFSG as pure good, RedHat style GPL'ing of their own development while bundling other people's commercial stuff as impure good, and closed development as evil), I think they are doing just fine.
They may become the more conservative, stodgy, "tux in a suit" distro as they grow, but so what? As long as it's still free, you can take it and make as cutting-edge and rebellious a distro as you like.
I don't see a big, even a huge, Redmond-ready RedHat as a threat, unless they start closing the source (some of which they can't thanks to the GPL -- Why do people hate the GPL? -- Never mind, let's not go there today).
I think you are wrong. There is a widespread and damaging perception that good == big in the technology world.
:-)
One of the great benefits of OSS is that we might be able to get away from the fear that if I buy into a minority technology I'll be left standing. I'd love to see Linux distros filling tiny little niche markets, and being able to do so becuase people know that they will be able to painlessly switch of their vendor goes belly up.
The other relevant point is that RH are growing by acquisition, which is what MS is famous for. To be fair, the skills shortage is so accute in some areas that it's nigh on impossible to grow except by acquisition, which exonerates many of the MS buyouts as well as this one.
Nonetheless, acquiring companies is a sure fire way to spread the message 'we are a big company who can buy little companies - we won't go bust'.
It's also wrong, of course.
The one thing I know about OSS is that it got where it is without commercial interest, and while I'd like to see some OSS business models work out, there is not the slightest evidence that any of them do*.
*A few people sustaining a turnover for a couple of years, and paying a few hundred salaries does not prove a business model
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RedHat realizes that the battle for the desktop, aka replacing Microsoft, will be a hard-fought battle with Microsoft having a better chance because they have more money.
In the embedded market, if you work is what matters. Consider too, that what has kept Microsoft where they are today is the OS and the supporting software (Office, for example). In the embedded world, the supporting apps don't matter.
(Note how WinCE isn't taking over as others thought it would.)
OpenSource therefore has the best chance in the embedded market. Cygnus is quite a player there, with most of its coders contracted out. (over 50% is what I read...) And, like it or not, the BSD licence better protects the embedded players in court than the GPL. How can *ANYONE* take you to court to force a source code release with the BSD licence? In the embedded world, one of the most important thing is the IP (Intellectual Property) of your product. BSD licence better protects IP as expressed in source. As GCC is a compiler, and a tool, it can be used to make code for any licence type, so Cygnus is a win/win GPL or not.
Oh, think this is good for OpenSource and the GPL? Try this: Motorola uses GCC on its switches. Ask Motorola for its changes to GCC. You won't get them. They say because they licenced them from FSF, they don't have to.
(If you have products using Linux 'embedded', then write the companies and ask for the source code. See what they say, just for yucks.)
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
It's more interesting in that we've seen a company specializing primarily in Linux consulting buy out a company which once specialized primarily in Windows software. In 1998 90% of Cygnus's revenue was based on versions of GNU pro and Code fusion which ran on Windows and competed directly with Microsoft Visual C++.
Sales of Cygwin and such represent sales. Since the product is already developed, such sales may even come at virtually no cost.
There's obviously not too likely to be immense changes to GCC (note: it's not called EGCS anymore... ); it might be reasonably argued that RHAT is acting to counter VA Linux Systems, as VA has lately been involved with the IA-64 deployement of GCC.
As for eCos, I suspect that it's not something RHAT will care much about. I also suspect that it hadn't yet become a substantial revenue stream for Cygnus. That bodes somewhat ill for it getting much continued support, although that's no guarantee.
I'm actually rather more interested in hearing what RHAT policy is on Source Navigator and such; it would be a rather positive step if they are released under (L)GPL, and rather distressing if they are not...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
This makes me sick. Red Hat is not evil. Have you ever been to a trade show and accually sat down and talk with an employee of redhat? They're very enthusiastic about Linux, and would only do whats best for the community.
What are you going to say when Red Hat turns up a profit (They haven't so far)? "They're being greedy by charging us $80 for Linux". Whatever. The Book, box, CD, etc may only cost $15, but the rest is all "greed money". Phone tech support is expensive. You have to pay a room full of people $7.50-$10 an hour, plus all the hardware and phone equipment needed to do that (well, it may only be 3-5 people, but still). Plus there is employee healthcare benifits. Oh oh, but thats right, we wouldnt want our redhat employees to be healthy, they're tools of SATAN!!! And food is overrated, they shouldn't buy anything.
You people are all warped and sick.
Now I know the alsa team are making a lot of progress, but what if redhat bought opensound and freed it? That would mean a hell of a lot more sound support for linux, something that every distro desparately needs. Just a thought.
Luckily, we have to GPL to prevent them from *forcing* us to use their compiler. gcc is gpl'ed, so no one really owns it. The other dists can compile their own gcc and use that.
However, I suppose they could provide a proprietary, but nice & slick, IDE that everyone chooses to use. But it doesn't seem RedHat's style to become a monopolist. Their business model is based on the notion that open source is a good thing (tm), as is Cygnus. I think it will end up being more like a 'pooling of skills', they weren't gobbling up a competitor. Cygnus was based (more or less) on selling support for open source software, as is Redhat, so there is no reason they won't continue on like that.
And remember, this is the company that hired Alan Cox and said he could pretty much do whatever the heck he wants. I'm not worried or nervous in the least.
Dana
Robert Young will no longer be in charge of day-to-day operations and Matthew Szulik will be the new CEO.
I suppose this is the source of the rumor. Not exactly true, but based in fact.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I could be off here, but it seems to me that a lot of people are having a knee-jerk reaction to RH's aquisition plans etc. What did you expect,
:) ). Unfortunately there are going to be more and more pressures on RH from outside ( 'the community') to do things in conventially brain-damaged ways. That doesn't mean they will follow that pattern. I think this possibility is what people are reacting to, rather than any action RH has really taken.
:) --- and things didn't get really solid until 2.0.x kernels (for me at least). But for example, the 6.x versions ship with a buggy gnome, and then try really hard to get you to use it. My 6.0 machines would dump a core in ~ every time you log in! Sometime gnome would hang for a minute or two with *no feedback* as to what was happening (unless you count the X error messages) 6.1 I thought would be better but it has all the signs of being a rush job to get the new installer out the door. Gnome was still problematic, there are config hiccups with less often use packages, and the 'upgrade' changes parts of *my* config without warning or backups. Annoying. I don't want to pick on Gnome, there are plenty of other examples but this message is way too long already...
.rpm vs say , .deb. The .deb is a better design, and fits in to existing tools more easily. Why didn't RH, realising this, bail on .rpm and make a set of good tools to sit on top of the .deb format? Ok, I know this has been talked to death, but I recall it to bring to mind the problems we could face in a couple of years if redhat has both a) de-facto control of a number of significant projects and b) a not-invented-here syndrome...
really? They have to do something with the (absurd) market cap they have or they will loose it, *fast*. There are a lot of holes in the RH business plan at the moment, so of course they will try and plug them. Whether or not a particular purchase is good idea for redhat or for 'the community' (whatever that is) is not such an easy question to answer.
I think it is *way* too early to start lumping them in with MS. Look, big (market wise) companies buy small ones because it is cheaper than developing in-house (or at least some PHB thinks it is). Why should we expect RH be different in that? The question is, what are they going to do with this new leverage they currently command in the commercial linux world? And what can we do to help keep them on track? Just because a company has money doesn't actually make them evil (statistical evidence aside
One interesting point is the fact that while RH and Cygnus are (were?) both commercial players in the open-source game, they had different outlooks. RH may have bundled commercial software, but it has always claimed that in-house software will be returned to 'the community'. Cygnus on the other hand had a commercial version/free version approach. The question is, will RH free up the Cygnus tools, or bundle them as a commercial add-on?
A more important issue is the long term scope of RHlabs. Indirectly, RH has aquired the current gcc maintenance codebase and people, no? This is not inherently a bad thing. However, it does raise a few interesting points: like how much concentration of OS projects is a good thing? If at some later date RH starts playing silly buggers with some of 'our' cherised projects, is the OS community going to be faced with the possibility of a series of ugly forks?
On a related note, RH is putting a lot of effort into PR on one side, and eye-candy (see new installer) on the other....fine, but they have some more serious problems to look at. I have recently played around with 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1 on both i386 and alpha. For the most part things have been smooth to get up and going (excepting 5.x on alpha). The problem is, once the system is up. I have never had as much trouble with a linux box as I have with the 6.x machines. Okay, that is not quite true... the 0.11x betas would fall down hourly when you played with them (but it was fun
The point I am getting at (slowly, sorry) is that this is a bad sign. My debian machines, slack machines, and the machines that were hand-built (no distro) had never given me this much trouble. The problem is that in NA at least RH is becoming synonymous with Linux in the minds of the great unwashed. So either we don't care what anyone else thinks (a valid, if limited scope, view) or we care what people think about RH. In the later case we really need to push them on the underlying technical issues a bit. It is a bit discouraging, for example, to see the possibility of a BETA-VHS type thing being precipitated by RH. Look at
Enough rambling!
S.
great, now they can hire some programmers to fix the pathetically buggy 6.1 install...
Inprise was woth less than $300 million this morning. It really would've been nice to see free versions of VisiBroker, Delphi, C++ builder, Interbase, etc. . . Not that I think this would happen in a million years. BTW, in terms of stock, Cygnus was also valued at 6 times as much as Motorola paid for Metrowerks. While I understand the reasons for Red Hat's purchase, doesn't it seem like they overpaid a bit ? --JRZ
Here is my list of companies RedHat shouldn't buy... Troll Tech. This is an eggshell and we don't want it broken. Let them do QT under the QPL at there own pace.
Actually, I think this might be a Good Thing. People flame the GNOME folks for releasing GNOME 1.0 before it was ready, but look at the bugs in Qt 2.x and you'll see Troll has the same problems. The difference is, it is one company, not legions of Open Source developers. If Red Hat bought Troll, they could GPL Qt, which I think would be a Good Thing. IMNSHO.
Now my list of companies to buy... Borland/Imprise.
Fine, but don't kill off their Windows product lines. Borland's C++Builder and Delphi make Windows development bearable.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I'm a member of the GCC (formerly egcs) steering committee, but this is just me speaking here.
egcs and FSF gcc re-merged in April 1999. There is no longer a separate egcs project. The former egcs team now controls the FSF gcc, the rifts have been patched up, and some of the key GCC developers are competitors to Cygnus (and possibly to Red Hat).
Cygnus marketing has no say on GCC releases, just as they had no say on egcs releases. Red Hat marketing won't be able to affect the timing or quality of GCC 3.0.
Cygnus donates a machine and network bandwidth, plus developers; however, the steering committee, not Cygnus (or Red Hat) controls the direction of the project.
Both Cygnus and Red Hat have good records in their interaction with the free software community, so even if we didn't have the safeguards in place that we do, there wouldn't really be anything to worry about.
The Linux box was sub-divided among all of the thousands of folks who told them to leave the name the same. One transistor per person ...
Now maybe Gilmore will have the bucks that Hudson needs to get his rotary rocket into space. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way