“Does Red Hat’s aquisition of Cygnus give the company the
final say on free software’s future?“
“So Red Hat — the leading U.S. distributor of the Linux-based
operating system — announced Monday that it will take advantage of
its sky-high stock valuation to acquire Cygnus Solutions, the first
company ever to make a business out of selling and creating free
software. Should the rest of the nascent free-software industry
start trembling in its open-source boots? Red Hat already employs
the largest concentration of top echelon Linux kernel hackers. But
now, in a single stroke, the company has also gobbled up a pool of
programming stars who work directly on other crucial parts of the
free-software infrastructure.”
“Most media attention — and public Red Hat statements — has
focused on the “synergy” created by the merger of the two
companies. Red Hat assembles distributions (packages of Linux-based
operating systems); Cygnus creates advanced programming tools and
software aimed at the fast-growing “embedded systems” niche. But
Cygnus programmers are also central to the ongoing development of
at least two pieces of software — the GNU compiler and the GNU C
libraries — that are absolutely essential to any Linux-based
operating system. The compiler — usually referred to as “gcc” —
is a tool that translates software programs into a form
understandable by a computer. The C libraries contain code that is
used and reused by software applications, such as graphic elements
that appear in multiple applications.”