Cyclic breaking even; Linux, OS/2 News

The big news for the spring of 1996 is that Cyclic is now on a stable financial footing. This is a significant achievement; many startups never get to this point. In addition to the fact that income is now sufficient to fund the work that we are doing, this income now comes from support contracts instead of custom development. While we are still happy to do custom development, we are glad to get the support contracts, because of the steady revenue.

Jim Kingdon of Cyclic attended the Linux Expo '96 on April 13 (http://www.linux.ncsu.edu/Expo96/). Our primary interest in Linux is in using it--PCs running Linux meet our need for a cost-effective unix-compatible platform. As for revenue, although we have seen relatively little interest in CVS support on Linux, CVS is distributed with many Linux distributions, and we expect the Linux market to continue to grow (both in number of users and in Linux starting to be used in the kinds of places where people might spend money on support). One thing we keep in mind is whether there is, or will be, an opportunity to partner with companies such as Craftworks, Caldera, Digital, or Red Hat (all of which were represented at the expo).

GNU software was mentioned in the April 1996 issue of OS/2 e-zine (http://www.haligonian.com/os2/v1n6/). Our favorite quote: "I call [GNU software developers] fanatics, and I don't use the term with a negative connotation" (we like the quote; we're not taking a position on whether we agree with it!). As for Cyclic and OS/2: the CVS client from the main CVS distribution runs on OS/2, but the non-client/server CVS OS/2 port has never been merged into the main distribution. Further development of the OS/2 port will, as usual, depend on customer and volunteer interest.