: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,
:27:00
filled a very essential niche because
we had this great software,
:27:05
you could get it for nothing but
you couldn't get support - they made their money
:27:10
by charging for support.
:27:13
The GNU project started by building a toolkit,
:27:17
uh, basic development tools such as
a C compiler, a debugger, a text-editor,
:27:23
and uh, other necessary apparatus.
:27:27
And their intention was eventually to
develop a kernel to sit underneath those
:27:33
and be the center of the operating system.
:27:36
By about 1990 they had successfully
developed that toolkit,
:27:40
and it was in wide use on great many variants of Unix.
:27:45
But there was still no free kernel.
:27:48
The kernel happened to be
one of the last things we started to do
:27:54
and we had started it not long before.
:27:57
And that's when Linus Torvalds came along.