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Cygnus Solutions and the FSF

Cygnus Solutions and the FSF (Free Software Foundation) cooperate on major projects, such as the port of the GNU development tools to Solaris 2. We look forward to continuing such cooperation in the future.

Cygnus Solutions maintains many programs and libraries for the FSF: g++ (the C libraries), gdb (the debugger), as (the assembler), ld (the linker), gprof (the performance analyzer), binutils (the binary utilities), libg++ (the C++ libraries) and the Binary File Descriptor libraries. In addition, Cygnus Solutions and the FSF share sources for other programs on a regular basis.

Both Cygnus Solutions and the FSF agree that free software is the best way to meet the industry’s technical needs.

However, Cygnus Solutions and the FSF have different missions.

Cygnus Solutions, as a for-profit company, concentrates on meeting its customer requirements.

The FSF concentrates on meeting the internal needs of the GNU project.

Therefore, Cygnus Solutions may not accept into our source tree certain FSF changes until they are reworked into a form acceptable for our customers —for example, changes that reduce performance or reliability on the software platforms we support.

Conversely, the FSF may not accept changes from Cygnus Solutions that improve support for only a limited group of users (customers of Cygnus Solutions).

Also, Cygnus Solutions sometimes supports non-FSF code. The C subroutine library is an example. The FSF’s version carries licensing restrictions which are impractical for customers who write code for embedded systems; as a result, Cygnus Solutions developed a subroutine library, newlib, containing the GNUPro C subroutine library and math library. The C subroutine library, although also freely re-distributable, does not carry the licensing restrictions that would inconvenience these customers.

Finally, although the FSF makes every effort to provide high-quality releases, its development requirements take priority. The FSF regards software testing as the user community’s contribution to the GNU project. Cygnus Solutions puts GNUPro Toolkit releases through a quality assurance cycle in large part driven by our knowledge of customer requirements.