Cygnus

Red Hat: From manic acquisitions to focused execution

Red Hat is at the top of its game right now, delivering quarter after quarter of impressive performance despite (or, perhaps, because of) a global recession. But it wasn't always thus. Despite a meteoric initial public offering in 1999, Red Hat spent years fumbling about for a winning game plan, dabbling in technologies that took it far beyond its core competence in operating systems.

Small wonder, then, that Red Hat today hasn't risen to the bait to move beyond its core competence.

In fact, it may well have been the burden of its IPO that set Red Hat … Read more

Google, Microsoft, Apple sued over preview icons

This post was updated on January 5 and January 7 with corrected and updated information about the plaintiff company, an updated link to an amended filing, and a comment from Google. See bottom of post for correction.

An Arizona-based networking company on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Google, Microsoft, and Apple, alleging that all three tech giants violated a patent it owns on the use of document-preview icons--or thumbnails--in operating systems.

In the suit, Cygnus Systems targets Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Vista and Internet Explorer 8, and Apple's iPhone, Safari, and Mac OS X as patent infringers. Apple … Read more

The next $1 billion open source acquisition? Give it 12-18 months

Michael Tiemann's Cygnus Solutions held the open-source valuation record for nearly a decade at $674 million. A few weeks back, Sun broke that record by paying $1 billion for MySQL. So how long does Michael think MySQL will hold the record?

Not very long.

...I would not be surprised to see another $1B deal of some sort in the next 12-18 months. The reason is simple economics:… Read more

What do open-source mergers and acquisitions mean?

Royal Pingdom has compiled a list of the seven largest acquisitions in open source's history. Sun's acquisition of MySQL is the biggest ($1 billion), but it's not nearly the outsized acquisition that it originally appeared to be considering that Red Hat paid $674 million for Cygnus Solutions back in 1999.

Indeed, that acquisition offers an interesting commentary on the value derived from open-source acquisitions. Here's why Red Hat bought Cygnus:… Read more