OSS Companies

[endersshadow]

If anybody feels like helping me out with some research (I'm not asking you to take a survey, relax), just name some companies that have open sourced their software. I'm looking at the changes that occur economically with open source software, so anything like Red Hat which has always been a vendor of OSS doesn't qualify (no, neither does Mandriva or Linspire), and I need a good base to start from. Moreover, they need to be publically traded so I can get their financials.

Yes, I'm open sourcing research. This post is licensed under the GPL :-P

[mostwanted]

IBM, Sun, Novell (which bought up two other open source companies: SuSE and Ximian), Trolltech. Neither are fully open source yet, but they make a lot of open source software.

[endersshadow]

Good start...had forgotten about IBM and Trolltech. And it doesn't matter if they're fully OSS yet or not, just as long as they've released some OSS :)

Thanks!

[welsh_spud]

Didn't Microsoft borrow the TCP/IP stack from BSD back in the day (whatever the hell that means).

Apple - Darwin, WebCore(KHTML)
Canonical - Ubuntu, The OpenCD, Launchpad
All those people who sell Linux CDs online
Linspire - Linspire, Lphoto, Lsongs, contributed loads to WINE, Gaim, KDE...

[endersshadow]

Didn't Microsoft borrow the TCP/IP stack from BSD back in the day (whatever the hell that means).

Apple - Darwin, WebCore(KHTML)
Canonical - Ubuntu, The OpenCD, Launchpad
All those people who sell Linux CDs online
Linspire - Linspire, Lphoto, Lsongs, contributed loads to WINE, Gaim, KDE...

All of those, with the exception of Apple, are not publically traded companies, nor have they ever had proprietary software that they've open sourced :-|

It's a good start...but unfortunately it doesn't help me out too much :-|

[GeneralZod]

All of those, with the exception of Apple, are not publically traded companies, nor have they ever had proprietary software that they've open sourced :-|

It's a good start...but unfortunately it doesn't help me out too much :-|

I dont know if the companies behind them were publically traded or not, but Blender and Xara both started out as proprietary software.

Edit:

I imagine you've already thought of Sun's Solaris and OO.o :)

[Qrk]

Canonical - Ubuntu, The OpenCD, Launchpad


I realize this is a bit of a touchy subject, but Launchpad isn't open source. The only thing I could find was a post claiming that Launchpad would eventually be put under an open source compatable lisence.