Cygnus Solutions

» see cygnus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Cygnus Support was incorporated on 13 November 1989 by three people already deep in the GNU project. Michael Tiemann had written GNU C++, the compiler that became g++, and David Henkel-Wallace came in alongside him. The third was John Gilmore, employee number five at Sun, who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation the following year. The idea was not a software idea at all: the GNU tools were free and were becoming genuinely good, and there was nobody on earth a company could phone when one of them broke on their hardware. Cygnus sold the phone call.

It worked faster than it had any right to. The first contract was signed in February 1990 and there was over 150,000 dollars of business on the books by the end of April. The first year closed at 725,000 dollars, bookings went to 1.5 million in 1991 and to 4.8 million by 1993, compounding at 65 percent or better. Forbes surveyed the field in August 1998 and found Cygnus was both the first open source business and by a distance the largest.

What the money bought was a payroll for the GNU toolchain. Cygnus maintained GDB and the binutils and contributed enormous amounts of GCC, and it wrote the BFD library that let all of it handle arbitrary object formats. The GNUPro toolkit it packaged on top was licensed by chip vendors as the official compiler for their own silicon. It also produced Cygwin, which put a POSIX layer under Windows, and eCos, a real-time kernel for embedded systems. Red Hat announced the merger on 15 November 1999 and closed it on 10 January 2000.

~ the dossier ~

~ making free software affordable ~

The slogan was Gilmore's and it is a precise description of the argument. Software with no license fee and no scarcity cannot be sold, so you sell the thing that is genuinely scarce, which is the small number of people who can change it on demand. In 1989 this sounded to most of the industry like a category error. Tiemann's own account of the early years is mostly about explaining to prospective customers why a company giving away its product could still be expected to exist in two years.

Every open-source business since has run a version of that argument, usually badly. The one that ran it well was the company that bought Cygnus. Red Hat took the same model to a 34 billion dollar sale to IBM in 2019, which is roughly fifty times what it paid for the firm that invented the model.

~ the toolchain nobody paid for ~

I went through a Turkish engineering faculty in the 2000s on gcc and gdb, the way everybody in every faculty did, and I could not have told you that either one had a payroll behind it. The working assumption was that free tools came from nowhere in particular. There had been a company in California paying the maintainers since 1990, and it was bought and dissolved before I ever got to university.

That invisibility was the product working correctly and it is also why almost nothing marks the company today. Cygnus code is in every cross-compiler toolchain in embedded work, including the ones I use now for hardware that did not exist when the company died.

~ into red hat ~

The terms were 6,624,344 Red Hat shares for all of Cygnus, valued at around 674 million dollars, in a stock-for-stock deal announced two months after Red Hat's own IPO had gone vertical. Red Hat was a distribution company with a consumer brand and no deep engineering bench; Cygnus was an engineering bench with no consumer brand and a decade of compiler expertise. The merger closed on 10 January 2000, alongside a smaller purchase of Hell's Kitchen Systems on the same day.

Tiemann became Red Hat's chief technical officer and the Cygnus engineers became the tools group that has maintained GCC inside Red Hat ever since. eCos was dropped commercially in 2002 and continued as a community project. Cygwin is still maintained and still ships. The company's own address is the only part with an undignified ending: cygnus.com redirects to a BrandBucket listing, where the word is on sale as a brandable name to whoever wants it.

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