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Re: What's in it for Redhat?


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@sourceware.org
Cygwin Co-Project Leader				aaaspam@duffek.com
TimeSys, Inc.

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