Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: Making free software affordable. Cygnus is a recursive acronym for "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". Year 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link displays 1989 Gregorian calendar). ... John Gilmore John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. ... Michael Tiemann is Vice President, Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc. ... Clockwise from top: The logo of the GNU Project (the GNU head), the Linux kernel mascot Tux the Penguin, and the FreeBSD daemon Free software is a term coined by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation[1] to refer to software that can be used, studied, and modified without... A recursive acronym (or occasionally recursive initialism) is an abbreviation which refers to itself in the expression for which it stands. ...

For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were the maintainers of several key GNU software products, including the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils (which included the GNU Assembler and Linker). It was also a major contributor to the GCC project. Cygnus developed BFD, and used it to help port GNU to many architectures, in a number of cases working under non-disclosure to produce tools used for initial bringup of software for a new chip design. GNU (pronounced ) is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. ... The GNU Debugger, usually called just GDB, is the standard debugger for the GNU software system. ... The GNU Binutils is a collection of programming tools developed by the Free Software Foundation for the manipulation of object code in various object file formats. ... Gas, commanded as as when typed from the shell, is the GNU assembler. ... ld is the command for a linker, which creates an executable file on Unix and Unix-like systems, such as GNU, from object files created during compilation. ... The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of programming language compilers produced by the GNU Project. ... The Binary File Descriptor library, most commonly seen as just BFD, is the GNU projects main mechanism for the portable manipulation of object files in a variety of formats. ... A non-disclosure agreement (NDA), also called a confidential disclosure agreement (CDA), confidentiality agreement or secrecy agreement, is a legal contract between at least two parties which outlines confidential materials or knowledge the parties wish to share with one another for certain purposes, but wish to restrict from generalized use. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ...

Cygnus was also the original developer of Cygwin, a POSIX layer and the GNU toolkit port to the Microsoft Windows operating system family, and of eCos, an embedded real-time operating system. Cygwin is a collection of free software tools originally developed by Cygnus Solutions to allow various versions of Microsoft Windows to act somewhat like a Unix system. ... POSIX or Portable Operating System Interface[1] is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system. ... GNU (pronounced ) is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. ... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ... An operating system (OS) is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... The correct title of this article is . ... A real-time operating system (RTOS) is a multitasking operating system intended for real-time applications. ...

On November 15, 1999, Cygnus Solutions announced its merger with Red Hat, and ceased to exist as a separate company in early 2000. As of 2007, 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. November 15 is the 319th day of the year (320th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1999 Gregorian calendar). ... Red Hat, Inc. ... 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2007 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• "Future of Cygnus Solutions — An Entrepreneur's Account" by Michael Tiemann - Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (January 1999)