John Gilmore: History of Cygnus's Growth | Hacker News Reader

John Gilmore: History of Cygnus's Growth

minnie.tuhs.org

75 pointscxr10 comments

> It wasn't just a compiler, it was a whole ecosystem that had to be built or improved. About half of our employees were software engineers, so by the time our revenues grew from <$1M/year to $25M a year, we were spending about $12M every year improving the free software ecosystem. And because we avoided venture capital for six years, and shared the stock ownership widely among the employees, when we got lucky after 10 years and were acquired by the second free software company to go public (the first was VA Linux, the second Red Hat), all those hackers became millionaires. A case of doing well by doing good.

Indeed. The sheer amount of economic impact GCC has had - it has to be enormous. Back in the day for example we were able to ship our s/w on Solaris SPARC and bunch of other platforms (HPPA/AIX(Forgot what arch) without licensing any compilers because GCC 2.95 existed! (As I recall compiler licenses were sold separately from the OS and weren't cheap especially for a non-US company.)

And all the vendor compilers had their own different bugs and such while GCC was GCC.

And that's if a proprietary compiler was actually available on the system. I worked for a widespread computational project that really needed GNU Fortran as eventually a reliable basis for people to use that was generally available.

On the other hand, some bugs were common. There was at least one that originated in the original Unix f77 (which became f2c) that turned up in the Sun(?) compiler some time after it had been fixed in g77.

There were differences in whether Unix systems came with a compiler. It caused a stir and an opportunity for Cygnus when Sun introduced Solaris without one.

>And because we didn't control the master source code for gcc, one of our senior compiler hackers, Jim Wilson, spent a huge fraction of his time merging our changes upstream into FSF GCC, and merging their changes downstream into our product, keeping the ecosystem in sync. We handled that overhead for significant other tools by taking up the whole work of maintenance and release engineering -- for example, I became FSF's maintainer for gdb. I would make an FSF GDB release two weeks before Cygnus would make its own integrated toolchain releases. If bug reports didn't start streaming in within days from the free software community, we knew we had made a solid release; and we had time to patch anything that turned up, before our customers got it from us on cartridge tapes.

They get it.

Man. I've seen first hand how unsustainable it actually is to adopt a "private fork" (in spirit because of course anyone can GPL request your source) business model. Your stuff stagnates and falls behind upstream because your business is elsewhere. You didn't have the discipline or acumen or backbone to work with upstream from the get go so the effort required come time to update everything is utterly massive and can easily amount to decades of engineering time. It's possible the leadership never really understood how software works and was convinced it would be a risk to contribute back upstream, but it's no excuse if you ask me. It's your responsibility as an engineer to help them understand.

I wish more business and lawyer and founder types understood software licensing and how to make money in the software ecosystem beyond pure cloud SASS.

"Cygnus: We make free software affordable."

(That countered the anti-slogans: "Free software: more expensive than money" and "Linux is only free if your time is worthless".)

I once asked Gumby if he and John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann named their company "Cygnus" as the result of typing "grep gnu /usr/dict/words". Without missing a beat, he replied that if they'd thought of doing that, they would have named the company "Wingnut".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingnut_%28politics%29

Wingnut (politics): According to Merriam-Webster, it is "a mentally deranged person" or "one who advocates extreme measures or changes: radical."

Jim Wilson named his machine wingnut for that reason.

It’d be nice to see more success stories like these in the free software community :(

Red Hat's engineering is surprisingly similar in spirit to what is described in the post, considering that it's several orders of magnitude larger and making money in a completely different way (selling support and certifications rather than contracting development work).

That was how Cygnus made most of up its money, not the contracting. In fact when we merged with red hat both organizations were about 200 people, but we had over 160 developers and they had about 20-30. The development group you mention is the descendant of cygnus’

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