“Red Hat, the leading Linux seller, will acquire software
company Cygnus Solutions for $674 million and has replaced its
chief executive officer, the company said today.”
“…chief operating officer Matthew Szulik will replace Bob
Young as Red Hat’s CEO, the company said. Young will continue
as chairman of Red Hat’s board. Red Hat will issue up to
6,624,344 shares to buy all the stock of Cygnus, a privately
held company. Cygnus had been considering going public itself, and
had even embarked on a name change to back up that strategy and
find a stock ticker symbol.”
“Cygnus has been an open-source company, meaning that like Red
Hat it released the underlying programming instructions to the
public. Cygnus also has joined companies such as Hewlett-Packard in
helping to sidestep Sun’s Java licensing requirements; has written
an open-source operating system called Ecos designed for ’embedded’
devices such as pagers and factory robots; and has helped companies
such as Oracle and Corel port their software to Linux.”