🚀 go-pugleaf

> Is Cygnus solely service-based? no proprietary code core?

They have some proprietary code, but it is not the majority of their
business. Most of their business is custom development, and support
contracts, AFAIK.

> (even SuSE and Redhat have a proprietary core)

The SuSE distribution depends on proprietary software in key parts of
the distribution. This is not the case with Red Hat. There are a few
proprietary add-ons on the "official" CD which hardly anyone uses as
far as I can tell, but they are in no way needed to have a fully
featured system. In fact, many other publishers serve essentially
clones of the "official" CD sans the few closed source and/or
non-freely redistributable packages. In fact, Red Hat ships such a set
themselves - the "Power Tools" CD set which has only the free parts of
the distribution

I know a lot of people who buy Power Tools preferentially just because
it is 100% free, so I wouldn't bet they make too large a majority of
the money from the "official" CDs.

They also have commercial ad-ons they distribute, but they seem to be
phasing these out more and more (CDE was recently dropped, Applixware
reverted to distribution by Applix), so I can't imagine that is a huge
part of their revenue.


> Would their business decrease if they concentrated on services and stopped
> writing free software, reducing their efforts to tailored solutions only?

Yes. I spoke to a Cygnus manager recently, and he described how (I
hope I am not giving away any corporate secrets here) Cygnus was
making a big push to improve gdb to be so good that a lot of people
would come to them for customization and support contracts for gdb
itself, rather than only coming with a primary interest in gcc. They
seem to think that making their open source software mcuh better at
their own expense will be a net business win for them. Given their
business record, I can't argue with them.

 - Maciej

-- 
guile -c '(define c call-with-current-continuation)(define(f s)(lambda(o)(let
((n(c(lambda(x)(o x)x))))(let p((n n)(l(string->list s)))(cond((not (null? l)
)(display(car l))(p(c n)(cdr l))))))))((f"Js nte ul akr")(f"utAohrGieHce\n"))'