Re: Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97

[Stan Shebs <shebs at cygnus dot com>]

   Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 16:45:44 -0800
   From: Jim Balter <jqb@netcom.com>

   > 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@cygnus.com" with one line of text: "help".