Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore,

Michael Tiemann Michael Tiemann is an American software developer and executive, serving as vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. Biography He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore Schoo ...

and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

. Its tagline was: ''Making free software affordable''. For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were the maintainers of several key

GNU GNU ( ) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popu ...

software products, including the

GNU Debugger The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, Assembly, C, C++, D, Fortran, Haskell, Go, Objective-C, OpenCL C, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust, and par ...

and

GNU Binutils The GNU Binary Utilities, or , is a collection of programming tools maintained by the GNU Project for working with executable code including assembly, linking and many other development operations. The tools are originally from Cygnus Solut ...

(which included the

GNU Assembler The GNU Assembler, commonly known as gas or as, is the assembler developed by the GNU Project. It is the default back-end of GCC. It is used to assemble the GNU operating system and the Linux kernel, and various other software. It is a part o ...

and

Linker Linker or linkers may refer to: Computing * Linker (computing), a computer program that takes one or more object files generated by a compiler or generated by an assembler and links them with libraries, generating an executable program or shar ...

). 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 A non-disclosure agreement (NDA), also known as a confidentiality agreement (CA), confidential disclosure agreement (CDA), proprietary information agreement (PIA), or secrecy agreement (SA), is a law, legal contract or part of a contract between ...

to produce tools used for initial bringup of

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

for a new chip design. Cygnus was also the original developer of

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and command-line interface (CLI) for Microsoft Windows. The project also provides a software repository containing open-source packages. Cygwin allows source code for Unix-like operati ...

, a

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

layer and the

toolkit port to the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

family, and of eCos, an embedded

real-time operating system A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time computing applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. A RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix ...

. In the 2001 documentary film '' Revolution OS'', Tiemann indicates that the name "Cygnus" was chosen from among several names that incorporated the acronym "GNU" such as "magnum", "wingnut", and "lugnut". According to Stan Kelly-Bootle, it was recursively defined as ''Cygnus, your GNU Support''. On November 15, 1999, Cygnus Solutions announced its merger with

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, and it ceased to exist as a separate company in early 2000. , 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

External links

* . * . {{Red Hat Free software companies Software companies disestablished in 2000 Software companies established in 1989 Defunct software companies of the United States