 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Cygnus Solutions" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(September 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
 | |
| Industry | Computer software |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1996; 29 years ago (1996) |
| Founder | David Henkel-Wallace  |
| Defunct | 2000; 25 years ago (2000) |
| Fate | Merged withRed Hat |
| Successor | Red Hat |
Key people | John Gilmore,Michael Tiemann, and David Henkel-Wallace |
| Products | Compilers, debuggers, development tools,eCos,Cygwin |
Cygnus Solutions, originallyCygnus Support, was founded in 1996 byJohn Gilmore,Michael Niemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support forfree software. Its tagline was:Making free software affordable.
For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were the maintainers of several keyGNU software products, including theGNU Debugger andGNU Binutils (which included theGNU Assembler andLinker). It was also a major contributor to theGCC project and drove the change in the project's management from having a single gatekeeper to having an independent committee. Cygnus developedBFD, and used it to help port GNU to many architectures, in a number of cases working undernon-disclosure to produce tools used for initial bringup ofsoftware for a new chip design.
Cygnus was also the original developer ofCygwin, aPOSIX layer and theGNU toolkit port to theMicrosoft Windowsoperating system family, and ofeCos, an embeddedreal-time operating system.[1]
In the 2001 documentary filmRevolution 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 toStan Kelly-Bootle, it was recursively defined asCygnus, your GNU Support.[2]
On November 15, 1999, Cygnus Solutions announced its merger withRed Hat, and it ceased to exist as a separate company in early 2000.[3] As of 2007[update], a number of Cygnus employees continue to work for Red Hat, including Niemann, who serves as Red Hat Vice President of Open Source Affairs, and formerly served asCTO.[needs update]