:25:00
you have a choice of businesses... that
:25:03
are in the business of
providing you with support.
:25:06
So they are going to have to in general give you
:25:09
good support or you go to somebody else.
:25:12
With proprietory software,
:25:15
support is a monopoly, there is one company,
:25:18
typically, that has the source code
:25:21
and only they can give you support
:25:24
so typically, you are at the mercy of a monopoly.
:25:28
That's the case, for example with Microsoft.
:25:31
So no wonder the support is so bad.
:25:35
The benefits of Free Software were
:25:37
tremendous but the cost of supporting it internally
:25:41
uh, and made managers very very nervous and
:25:43
so the fundamental idea I had was
if we can build a model
:25:48
that could deliver two to four times the support
:25:53
and uh, and uh, and hand holding capability
:25:57
that an internal engineer could provide.
:25:59
And we could do it at 1/2 to 1/4 of the cost
:26:03
that would meet the test of whether or not
:26:05
people would actually buy.
:26:07
And by about the Fall of that year, we had
:26:10
all the things worked out about who
:26:13
needed on the technical team, what
:26:15
the terms the sale would be, what
:26:17
the key price point were, and we
:26:19
actually received our incorporation in Nov of 1989.
:26:25
One of the most difficult things in starting our company
:26:28
was actually finding a name for it.
:26:30
I explained this to one of my friends
:26:33
"we're having difficulty"
:26:34
and he returned an e-mail message
:26:37
that basically just had a bunch of words
with the name "GNU" in it.
:26:42
And "Cygnus" was the one that
looked least obnoxious and least obscene.
:26:48
I can say very clearly that Cygnus
:26:52
was the first business that specialized in Free Software.
:26:56
Cygnus supported Free Software,