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\title{Company Overview}
\author{Cygnus Support}
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% \section*{Introduction}
Cygnus Support was founded in 1989 to provide commercial support for
free software.  Its founders~---~ Michael Tiemann, David Wallace, and
John Gilmore~---~began using free software because of its
% totally awesome
outstanding features and superior quality, but found that maintaining
it diverted too much time from their real work.  Other users
duplicated this support effort, or chose commercial software which was
% totally lame
not as powerful, efficient, or useful.  Cygnus Support was founded to
solve this dilemma by providing centralized, cost-effective support.
Using Cygnus Support, users who did their own support can recover
valuable staff time.  Users of proprietary software now have the
choice of using {\em supported} free software.

Free software is distributed as source code, and users can copy it,
distribute it, and modify it as desired.  This gives free software
extremely wide distribution and use compared to commercial software,
creating a large support market.  It also causes free software to
evolve more quickly than commercial software, since more people work
on it simultaneously, adding the features they like and fixing the
bugs they find.  Centralized support is necessary in such an
environment to merge each user's changes and provide quality
assurance.

Our products combine the excellent, quickly evolving GNU software with
stable, well-tested releases; guaranteed response via phone, fax, or
electronic mail; improved documentation and training; and special help
for critical problems.  This gives our users the best of both worlds:
full source code and full commercial quality software.

% The most widely used free software (and the software most urgently
% needing commercial support) was the GNU software from the GNU project.
% The GNU project was started in 1983 by Richard Stallman to promote
% free software.  Its aim is to write the best software in the world and
% release it under a license which encourages software sharing.  GNU's
% Emacs editor now runs on virtually every machine that supports UNIX.

As a result of our technical experience and unique software product,
Cygnus Support has won and continues to win major contracts with
leading companies and research labs.

Our products include a C compiler, a C++ compiler, a source-level
debugger, a portable assembler, object-code manipulating programs,
subroutine libraries, an extensible self-documenting text editor and
user interface (Emacs), a variety of text searching and processing
tools, and a command interpreter.

Our C compiler, {\tt gcc}, compiles code more over a dozen different
instruction sets.  It was the first compiler to implement the ANSI C
standard, and is the only compiler that permits the debugging of
optimized programs.  It runs quickly, and produces code that also runs
quickly.

Our C++ compiler, {\tt g++}, was the first true compiler for C++,
producing assembler code rather than translating C++ into C.  It
implements all the features of AT\&T C++ 2.0.  It runs on any machine
that {\tt gcc} supports, and does the same optimizations.  It also
provides additional C++ specific optimizations.

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\section*{Key Personnel}

Michael Tiemann, President, has been writing free software since 1987.
He wrote the code for GNU C's function inlining.  He wrote a portable
instruction scheduler which boosted GNU C's performance by 30\% on the
SPARC.  He is the author of GNU C++, the first available native code
C++ compiler.  Mr. Tiemann has ported the GNU compiler to the SPARC,
Motorola 88000, and National 32032 architectures, as well as adding
support for Sun's FPA board on Sun 3s.  He ported the GNU debugger to
the SPARC and Intel 80386 architectures, extended the debugger and
linker to handle C++ features, and ported the linker to SPARC.

He developed the initial version of GNU C++ as core technology for a
project at MCC.  He has since developed free software at INRIA (French
National Institute of Computer Science, Paris), Stanford University,
and Sun Microsystems.  He frequently gives talks about free software,
and has been instrumental in helping to establish commercial
acceptance of free software.

\medskip
John Gilmore, Generalist, was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems.
He participated in design reviews of the instruction sets for the
Motorola 68010 and 68020, and Sun SPARC, and worked on the first
bringups of UNIX on 68010 and 68020 processors.  He produced twenty
stable releases of bootstrap firmware and diagnostics for the Sun-1,
Sun-2, and Sun-3 over four years.  More than half of his 34 years have
been spent programming and designing computers.

For the past eight years Mr. Gilmore has written, collected,
maintained, and distributed free software, in conjunction with the
Usenet, the Sun User Group, the Free Software Foundation, and many
individuals around the world.  He has been regression-testing each GNU
C compiler release against a large test suite since the first release.
He wrote the GNU versions of the ``tar'' and ``uucp'' programs.

\medskip
David Wallace, Director of Support, has been involved in computing and
Artificial Intelligence for over a decade.  He has developed and
supported large systems at laboratories around the world, such as
Stanford CSLI and Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, the Centre Mondial
Informatique in Paris, the MIT and Atari AI labs in Cambridge, and
most recently MCC in Texas and in California.  At MCC he was not only
the primary implementor of the CYC inference system, but for the two
years before joining Cygnus he also produced and supported quarterly
CYC releases.

As with Mr Gilmore, Mr Wallace's involvement in free software predates
the GNU project.  At MIT he worked extensively as maintainer and as an
implementor of new features for MACLISP and the original Emacs, which
were widely used around the ARPAnet in the late 70s and 80s.  After
leaving MIT for MCC he continued to contribute and maintain a number
of widely-used and free utilities for the AI and symbolic computing
community.

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