Red Hat at the crossroads (ITPro) [LWN.net]

ITPro looks at Red Hat's history and current state. "As the biggest open source company in the world, Red Hat stands at a significant crossroads between its open source roots and significant growth in enterprise demand for its products, as underlined by changes made to its management, discontent within its user community and a sharp rise in profits."

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One error in the article

Posted Jan 18, 2008 2:46 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

The article states:

"Characteristically, Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU and the FSF, speculated that Cygnus, like GNU, had been named as a recursive acronym, which can be translated as 'Cygnus, Your GNU Support'."

Oh, that Stallman, thinks it's all about GNU, ha ha. Except that he wasn't speculating. Early Cygnus T-shirts had the letters "gnu" in Cygnus underlined, and Mike Tiemann personally told me back in 1992 or 3 that they looked for words containing "GNU" when they were looking for a name, they liked Cygnus, and realized that "Cygnus, your GNU support" worked as a "backronym". My group at UC Berkeley was an early Cygnus customer and I worked with them closely, drowning them in bug reports. I did serious work with g++ in 1990, which was rather scary and random code in those days (it's about 10,000% better now).

Now, it's certainly true that later Cygnus management said that Cygnus didn't stand for anything; corporations commonly do that, especially since in the late 90s when they were hoping to score an IPO they were trying to go proprietary. In many ways, Red Hat saved Cygnus by buying them; they immediately transitioned all of the proprietary Cygnus offerings to open source.