🚀 go-pugleaf

I see there's been a lot of messages from a couple of folks on the net
about what we do here at Cygnus Support, and a number from people here
attempting to explain.  Since none of them "speak for the company" and
since the volume seems to have died down I thought I'd send on a note.
I started Cygnus Support with two friends in my living room in 1989
so indeed, I do speak for the company.

It's true: Cygnus Support staff serve as the GNU project maintainers
of certain GNU programs, on company time, with the blessings of the
company management.  I've never heard any complaints about this from
the FSF, only thanks.

But they're a different organization, with different goals and
personnel from Cygnus Support.  I don't speak for them and they don't
speak for us.


Since I'm writing, I thought I'd take the opportunity to clear up a
few other frequent questions about how we work: 

 - We don't work only on GNU software.  For instance, the libc we
   distribute (and which is up for ftp and used by the crossgcc folks)
   isn't the GNU one, since the GPLL is (sadly) unworkable for certain
   embedded developers.  But it is all nonproprietary.

 - Several of our customers redistribute the software they get from us.
   Fine.  It's free software.  But if you get a copy from them, don't
   ask me about it.  Ask them.

 - We only work on nonoproprietary software.  We sometimes do
   non-disclosure work, eg for unannounced hardware, but that has to
   ultimately become freely redistributable or else it wouldn't be
   worth working on for us.  Note that in situations like this you
   wouldn't _want_ those patches since there's no hardware for the
   machines they support, and the evental hardware might itself be
   different!

 - Yes, our releases are different from the FSF releases.  Sometimes
   we make changes they don't want!  For instance, for a long time gcc
   was by default incompatible with sun's compiler because gcc
   corrected a bogus calling-convention problem on the SPARC.
   Unfortunately, to most users the incompatibility meant "gcc doesn't
   work".  The compiler we shipped defaulted a switch the other way
   from the FSF's default setting -- so our customers didn't have to
   deal with this.  It took a long time for the FSF to decide that
   compatibility was worth the drawbacks of the flawed calling
   convention.

 - If you'd like a copy of the software from us, contact us and we'd
   be happy to sell you a support contract and send you some software
   with it.  I don't think that bare redistribution without support
   help us or most users.  We get plenty complaints from people who
   got copies from third parties and then want us to develop free
   bugfixes ("Hey, the guy I got it from said to call Cygnus if I had
   any problems.").  I also don't think that either the FSF or we
   would benefit from there being multiple "standard" releases.  As it
   is GNU packages maintained by people here tend to have more
   frequent net releases than most other GNU packages, so stuff
   circulates pretty quickly.

In short: we're a free software business.

If you've read this far and you still have questions, comments, or bug
reports on anything we do or say, please feel free to drop me a line
at gumby@cygnus.com or +1 415 903 1407.

Cheers,
David Henkel-Wallace
Cygnus Support