From: shebs AT cygnus DOT com (Stan Shebs) Subject: Re: Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97 14 Feb 1997 02:41:42 -0800 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199702140226.SAA14413.cygnus.gnu-win32@andros.cygnus.com> Original-To: jqb AT netcom DOT com Original-CC: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com In-reply-to: <3303B5B8.2DCE@netcom.com> (message from Jim Balter on Thu, 13 Feb 1997 16: 45:44 -0800) Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 16:45:44 -0800 From: Jim Balter > True enough, this is a change from past practices. We've also > switched to bringing in $20M/year instead of $1k/month. :-) Cygnus is > just a business, and we have to adapt our strategy to what makes the > most sense businesswise. But Cygnus didn't start out doing "what makes the most sense businesswise", they started out with RMS' premise that it was possible to make "enough" money supporting free software. Companies that don't pay attention to business don't last long. I wasn't there when Cygnus was founded, so I can't say for sure, but if you look at Cygnus' history, it's made business-savvy decisions from the start. The business world is pretty brutal, and there are many competitors that would be perfectly happy if Cygnus went under. Perhaps Cygnus would be willing to put such contributions under the LGPL at the authors' request? It would depend on the situation, but it would have to be a pretty amazing contribution to be worth that much trouble. This doesn't answer the questions. Your product isn't ready for a commercial market, but I wonder if the people projecting profits realize that. It's already in use in "commercial markets", namely, there are a bunch of Cygnus customers happily using cygwin32 GCC. You can go and tell them that they're using something that's not ready yet, but you might get some quizzical looks... And what about this "POSIX" claim in the press release? Have you obtained the certification that gives you the right to make the claim? I've talked to the marketeers about that - although the original has some weasel words, they've agreed to put together a better statement about what we're supporting. (I wanted to say "the parts of POSIX that are actually useful", but that was considered unpolitic...) > (Which motto are you thinking of anyway?) "Making free software affordable." I don't know how you get "support only" out of that. There are many megabytes of GNU code that were written by Cygnus engineers working under high-priced development contracts. In any case, this is a marketing slogan - it refers to how expensive it gets for a company to do its own support and/or development, vs having a specialist like Cygnus do it. It's not a company philosophy or anything deep. Stan - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".