Former Red Hat and Cygnus technology executives Kim Knuttila and Erik Troan have formed Specifix Inc., an open source company that produces solutions targeting enterprises, hardware OEMs and other Linux users that need to tailor the Linux operating system.

Linux developers will have a chance to hear and learn more about Specifix when the company presents a paper entitled, "New Approaches in Software Provisioning and System Maintenance," at the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium July 21-24.

Specifix brings together leaders and experts from the Linux and GNU open source development tools communities to deliver Conary--a technology for building, deploying and managing a single Linux code base across unlimited number of configurations and hardware platforms. With Conary, users can modify Linux source code to suit their needs, track and merge changes with the Specifix Linux reference implementation and build the tailored OS. This cycle can be repeated through multiple versions of the users' tailored Linux OS.

The Specifix management team represents more than 35 years of Linux, GNU tools and open source development experience. Kim Knuttila, the company's co-founder and chief executive officer, was most recently the VP of Engineering Services at the Linux company Red Hat, Inc. In this capacity he managed the former Cygnus business unit to deliver open source and embedded Linux solutions. Before that, he served as VP of Engineering with Cygnus Solutions, a tools developer acquired by Red Hat in 1999, where he was responsible for partnering with industry-leading OEMs to produce open-source based tools for their hardware platforms.

"We are extremely excited about having the opportunity to execute on a dream that Erik and I share to deliver open source solutions designed for a company's unique needs," said Kim Knuttila. "We've built groundbreaking development and deployment technologies to enable OEMs, internal IT groups and device manufacturers to take advantage of the power and infinitely customizable nature of open source."

Erik Troan, co-founder and Executive VP of Operating Systems brings extensive open source and Linux development experience to Specifix. For the past decade, Troan led the development vision at Red Hat, where he served as Chief Developer and VP of Product Engineering. In this capacity, Troan was responsible for specifying and building all products developed by Red Hat, including RPM, Linux operating systems, the Red Hat Network, high performance web servers, and the infrastructure for Red Hat's web site. He led teams in engineering, quality assurance, documentation, and product marketing with offices all over the world. Most recently, Troan was Senior Director of Product Marketing at Red Hat, where he was responsible for the marketing and positioning of Red Hat's product lines, including software products and service offerings.

Specifix is already gaining traction with industry leaders. "Rackable Systems looks forward to working with Specifix to build Linux solutions that meet customer demands for high performance systems on both IA-32 and X86-64 platforms," said Tom Barton, CEO of Rackable Systems, a leading provider of Linux-based high-density computing systems.

The Linux Symposium (www.linuxsymposium.org/2004) is a core technology conference, targeting software developers working on the Linux kernel, OS infrastructure, security, networking, and related research projects.

About Specifix Inc.

Founded in 2003 by open source industry veterans Kim Knuttila and Erik Troan, Specifix is the creator of Linux solutions customized according to customers' specific needs.