Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 10:16:12 -0400 From: Christopher Faylor To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Re: What's in it for Redhat? Message-ID: <20050726141612.GB26675@trixie.casa.cgf.cx> Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com References: <9bbd279405072604461f18ac87 AT mail DOT gmail DOT com> <42E63064 DOT 4080601 AT etr-usa DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <42E63064.4080601@etr-usa.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.8i On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 06:45:24AM -0600, Warren Young wrote: >Red Hat is involved because they bought Cygnus back in the dot-com boom >days. Right. I remember sitting in a meeting where someone asked Matthew Szulik (Red Hat CEO) what Red Hat was going to do with Cygwin. He blinked and said something like "I don't know. Maybe we won't keep it." Just prior to the buy-out, Cygnus had made an effort to sell Cygwin commercially but it fizzled pretty quickly. Our CEO was focused on setting up an embedded development IDE environment and Cygwin didn't really fit in there. These days, Red Hat's involvement in Cygwin development is very small. I no longer work there and most of the work that Corinna does is on her own time. Corinna's main responsibilities these days revolve around doing gdb ports to various embedded processors. When I did work there, I stopped being paid to work on Cygwin after 1999, since I had to spend a lot of time sharpening my hair. Red Hat does still sell the occasional Cygwin "proprietary" license but it certainly doesn't funnel the money that it gets from this sale back into Cygwin development. I did do some major work on Cygwin for Red Hat just before leaving in 2004 but it was done in my spare time as a favor to the remnants of the old Cygnus group. They had a (rare) fairly big ($$$) project which required signals to work with threads and they needed cygserver to work better. Corinna took the cygserver stuff and I did the signals with threads. In that scenario, Red Hat did fund some development. I believe that there is also some ongoing support work that is being funded. Otherwise, like I said, it's all volunteer. So, any licensing revenue that Red Hat gets is real gravy. -- Christopher Faylor spammer? -> aaaspam AT sourceware DOT org Cygwin Co-Project Leader aaaspam AT duffek DOT com TimeSys, Inc. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/