Subject: Re: RedHat acquisition of Cygnus???
From: Chris Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: "Charles S. Wilson" <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 16:44:12 -0500

On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 10:27:21AM -0500, Charles S. Wilson wrote:
>According to the following *RUMOR* posted on slashdot,
>http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/10/0823222, RedHat has inked a
>deal to acquire Cygnus. Now, I realize that, if true, Cygnus employees
>cannot comment. However, I'm not a Cygnus employee.  

Hey, I'll comment!  The first I heard about this was on SlashDot, too.
I don't have any inside scoop on what's going on but, then, I wouldn't
expect to know about this at my level in the company (I'm a first line
engineering manager/engineer).

To say that I was surprised to see the announcement would be a slight
understatement.

>I think this is a stupid move for both companies. Yeesh - what is it
>with corporations these days? Are acquisitions of other companies
>outside their core competency area the only way to grow? Is Cygnus
>looking at RedHat's vast market capitalization as a means of hiring
>enough lawyers to defend against MS' inevitable lawsuit (since MS will
>sue anyone who has a pulse and sells "platform" software)?
>
>What do you think?

Well, we have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft so I don't think
we're too worried about being sued.

I'm sure that there are a number of reasons to consider such a merger.
There are certainly parts of Cygnus that would fit very well into
RedHat's core competencies and vice-versa.  gcc and gdb come to mind.

Of course, my initial thought when I heard this was "What about Cygwin?"
I guess you could stretch things a little to say that Cygwin, being UNIX
on Windows is sorta a little like linux but I can still worry...

>If the moderator considers this offtopic, then I apologize for posting
>it -- and please move discussion to the slashdot forum. However, I
>thought it was of interest to cygwin users.

I don't consider this off-topic.  I'd love to hear comments about this.

cgf

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