9 Open Source Companies to Watch 122
An anonymous reader writes "A look at 9 open source companies to watch, focusing on everything from systems management to portals to apps servers.
" Silly bits like where their names come from to less silly bits like how much VC they got and what they actually do. I haven't heard of many of these, but it's encouraging to see a growing number of businesses being built around Open Source.
N3P - The #1 Open Source company to watch! (Score:3, Interesting)
They missed the #1 Open Source company to watch:
N3P [n3p.se]
"N3P offers a brand new, contrasting and intrepid two-year college level training in how to become a successful Project Entrepreneur in Open Source. Our students will learn not only the technical possibilities, but also how to exploit new business opportunities, manage profitable ideas, and create flourishing businesses. The training will focus on how to generate business using open source."
N3P [n3p.se]
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Entrepreneurship is something that, almost by definition, can't be taught, because it involves identifying how to use resources no one had before thought to identify. If you can systematize the method, it's not longer entrepreneurship, but a rote process.
If, on the other hand, they're just using the term "entrepreneur" to mean manager, and they're just going to teach you what you need to know to run a business, they'
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Re:N3P - The #1 Open Source company to watch! (Score:4, Insightful)
I know, it sounds like a nitpick, but I don't like when people act like, hey, once you teach this course, you'll be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship comes precisely from not following standard thinking. Maybe I didn't say that right...
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I've actually been listening to the entrepreneur podcasts from the HBS (on itunes - free), and they are quite valuable... some good insite. The biggest thing to remember is that ideas are easy, identifying opportunities and avoiding obsticles is difficult. Some good advice on running with your idea, what the true cost of VC investment is, social engineering (ahem - advertizing), etc... Worth a listen if your even considering going into buisiness (owning your own
Re:N3P - The #1 Open Source company to watch! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hardly.
- Cooking, for example, is deeply systemized - but it's hardly rote. Considerably experience and knowledge is required to routinely produce great dishes. (I can hand you a recipe - and even with that experience and knowledge you might not be able to duplicate it. My sister, who is a trained chef, cannot (yet) duplicate several of my dishes.)
- Chess is deeply systemized - but it takes considerable skill to know how and when to apply a specific tactic, or a counter to a specific tactic (after learning how to recognize it).
- Military tactics and doctrine are deeply systemized - but it's decidely nontrivial to apply those in real situations. When the SSBN I served on went on patrol, we carried a shelf of books nearly five feet long detailing the tactics, doctrine, and philosophy of conducting a deterrent patrol as well as general submarine operations - but it takes years to master the material and know when to follow 'the book' and when to 'punt' (go your own way).
Now, I'll agree with you that you cannot teach how to identify opportunities - but you can codify how to search for, evaluate, and exploit them.Re: (Score:1)
The 9 (Score:5, Informative)
2. Digium - open source PBX
3. Hyperic - manage heterogenous it environments
4. Optaros - consulting
5. Qlusters - open source systems management platform
7. Sahana - secure web portal
8. ws02 - open source application server
9. zenoss - network and systems-monitoring software
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Biasses: No embedded companies (Score:5, Insightful)
This list is only looking at servers etc and none of these projects/companies would be of any interest in embedded space.
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Re: you left out rPath (Score:2, Interesting)
The Article Title is incorrect, there are 10 (Score:1)
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Your summary gave me just the info I was curious about: the names of the nine companies in question. Good job!
Have you considered trying to summarize U.S. f
Not even a particularly good list. (Score:4, Interesting)
A proposal I made many many years back was to run a league table, where so many points were scored for the release of an open source product, so many points were scored for updating someone else's open source product, so many for closed source products that supported or enhanced the usability of an open source product, etc. The more open source, the more points. Also, the more significant (in terms of power, flexibility, etc) the more points, and the more practical the more points.
The idea was to show who actually was doing work, versus who was merely bragging about it. The idea was also to make major Open Source figures (some of whom have never actually released a product but have contributed to many) just as prominent in the table as major corporations with Really Big Bucks to throw around. It would also show those who are working on making Open Source a key player in the computing world, even if their products are not themselves Open Source.
(Oracle would score points for having put their corporate database on Linux, for example, but it would not be as much as Computer Associates for putting their corporate database - Ingres - not only on Linux but opening up the source as well. Postgresql would score more yet, as it is not only Open Source but regularly maintained.)
Newcomers are at no disadvantage, because whatever REAL added value will show up notwithstanding the newness or the lack of awareness. If there's no added value, then there is nothing there to watch. It's merely a rebadge. If there's added value and this value is constantly added to (which is what a new company should be doing), then it will be a very obvious rapid-riser through the charts.
Proprietary vendors who are wary of opening their high-value major product lines will obviously not score as well, nor should they, but they will be represented as a function of what they have contributed - directly in terms of products, and indirectly in terms of improved usability.
Then, journalists MIGHT have a clue as to what is interesting and what is not. They might also have a clue as to what is significant, what is likely to become "big news" and what is worth the effort of covering.
As it stands, they neither know nor care. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. Mind you, what I'm aiming for, with this idea, is not to introduce honesty, but rather to give people a copy of the songbook. Let people see for themselves if the tune is any good or is even what it's claimed to be. It would seem to me that an informed userbase will take care of the honesty issue by itself.
Re:The 9 - Crisply! (Score:1)
9 Open Source (cutting edge) companies... buried in a 1997 web model where the ads take 75% of the space. I can live with a few smoothly placed ads, but that was ridiculous.
I have this list stored, and I will research it later.
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Nope (Score:1)
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It's just a javascript form submit. If I could put HTML forms on here I would do that, just like they did... Anyway, my bad.
WORKING print view (Score:2, Informative)
Begone, foul beast (Score:5, Funny)
Bill Karpovich, bringing vague managerial-speak to OSS since August 2005.
Future ventures to include:
Paradigmoss
Leveragoss
Top-downoss
Empoweros
Bleedingedgeoss
Really, I could go on and on... But for the sake of my own sanity, I'll stop there. Besides, companies have been named far worse [synergisticsinc.com].
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Cool topic (Score:1)
Besides Red Hat (Score:5, Interesting)
I was at a conference a few months ago sitting in an Open Source track, and the panel of Open Source vendors basically said that the best chance of success in the open source business was to be renamed Red Hat and to have come about about six years ago.
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OSS is a philosophy and a strategy (Score:1, Insightful)
The OSS companies with a fighting chance of making it are ones which aggregate (RedHat et al), or ones which have huge numbers of users with some small fraction willing to pay for support (MySQL, SugarCRM,
To paraphrase some sales guys I used to work with, anything you give away for free has no value. In this case value means revenue potential. If the customer is not willing to pay to support the free product, then why are you "selling" the support?
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Nope. Neither one. (Score:2)
MySQL is a privately owned German company, but they say that they've been funded by VC's since 2001.
So, no neither of those companies are profitable.
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Minor clarification, Apache is not a company. There are several companies that make money supporting products that are from the Apache community. This is one of the best things about Apache products, no 'company' controls them. Take Apache Tomcat or Apache Geronimo for instance, you can get support from Chariot Solutions, Covalent, IBM, Logic Blaze, Novell and Virtuas. And all of these companies have contributors to the projects, (along with guys that are not affili
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Ubuntu is a company also, is it not, didn't M Shuttleworth make his money from selling books about open source and had enough left to form the Cannonical company?
Re:Besides Red Hat (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Shuttleworth got rich selling his former company (Thawte Consulting) to VeriSign.
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Apple, for example, relies heavily on GCC to make their applications and OS and contributes extensively to the GCC code base. The same with WebKit/Safari/KHTML, though they have been accused of being not quite cooperative in the past, they did get past that. Then their is their use of BSD in their OS, their release of the QuickTime Streaming Server, Bonjour networking protocol, their use of the CUPS print system, and a couple other examples including Apache, Javascript, etc.
Apple
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If they DIDN'T use those OS programs, they wouldn't have half the features or capabilities, which would severely affect their business model... that, or be very expensive and time consuming to develop themselves.
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Look, Microsoft has to spend several years and billions of man hours to write an OS.
Apple has the freedom to use source from FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD as their foundation, freeing them up to instead write innovative front end solutions, such as Expose, Quartz, Dashboard, and Time Machine in the time that it takes Microsoft to release something equivalent to Quartz. At the same time Apple is also a smaller, much smaller, comp
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My definition: A company that uses open source, contributes to open source projects, and releases internally developed projects as open source. Apple does all three of those things.
What is your definition, and by that definition what companies count?
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"open source company"
"company that does some stuff with open source"
You defined the latter.
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DynDNS (Score:2)
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Are there any other open source based companies besides Red Hat that are actually profitable? I don't mean this to be flamebait, just wondering.
Tons actually. Mostly individuals or small groups of people many working as consultants. You don't have to work for Microsoft, IBM, HP, CA, Oracle to someone that treats you like a meet factory product. It is a growing business, software support and people who are really into the OSS support business, and are not BSers do well. BSers skid fast.
IBM realized this,
Hyperic (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.hyperic.com/ [hyperic.com]
-John Mark
Community Manager
Hyperic
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The question I'd like to see... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not trying to be negative or cynical, but it's surely the most interesting question as an external observer.
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I'm not trying to be negative or cynical, but it's surely the most interesting question as an external observer.
well, considering that this question has been answered here, there and virtually everywhere, repeatedly, for the last 5-6-7 years now, if you are not trying to be negative or cynical, one must suspect you of trolling.
i'm not trying to be mean, just a casual observation from an external observer.
Re:The question I'd like to see... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did anyone mod this up? At best it is a straw man argument. At worst it is a troll.
Oh wait, let me guess... "support", right? Oh, sure...
Allow me to translate. The previous poster said that the question was answered over and over again. This poster asserts that the previous poster must have meant that answer was "support," even though that was never mentioned anywhere, and then went on to decry (not debunk he simply makes assertions to the contrary, but does not provide any reasons).
Just in case this last poster was just ignorant and not a troll, allow me to make a quick summary of how OSS fits into the business world. Proprietary software is made by a single company and sold to multiple companies for as much as they can get. A cheaper method is for the companies that want to use software to collaborate on the development (OSS) and each only pays for what they need. In addition to that, they all get access to bug fixes and features someone else needed for free. Sometimes this is done by using internal developers who become experts in the software. Sometimes this is done by hiring outside developers to do the work you need. For projects like Apache, there is a core group of developers paid to make general improvements and to make specific customizations or improvements on commission. Developers are paid for support, customization, new features, and sometimes just given a salary to make general improvements and be an internal expert until something specific is required. The actual code is used to provide services or products to other people.
In this model, the developers have less chance of "making it big" but at the same time they can undercut the costs of the competition and provide a better product and have more widespread adoption of their product, which brings a lot of prestige and can lead to other financial opportunities. This model has only been working for a few decades and is in constant use by IBM, Apple, Cisco, and pretty much any major IT company you can think of, and I've, personally, read explanations not very different from this one a dozen times. Please stop asking this.
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All the proprietary hardware companies have been succesful using this model, so naturally it applies to open source software companies.
You just don't get it. IBM is an open source software company. They create tons of OSS code and they use it to make a ton of money selling hardware, services, and in other markets. Think of it this way. What if the union of carpenters and construction workers figured out a way to create better hammers, cheaper than the manufacturing industry can. They did so, and benefite
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We use Open Source, too. I haven't seen a reliable way of making money from it. Or are you, Mr. Coward, going to poo-poo everyone who wants to make a living writing software?
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Re:The question I'd like to see... (Score:4, Informative)
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A paypal button on their website of course!
Not a problem for us (Score:1)
So far, no one bats an eye at our enterprise version pricing.
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Hyperic has to turn down customers, although that won't be the case for long, as we bring in more people.
So far, no one bats an eye at our enterprise version pricing.
Product looks good, Gentoo support which rocks since that's what we use here, but you're violating one of my pet peeves.
Try to find out about pricing info and there is none. You have to contact a sales person to even get a ballpark figure.
For what it's worth, I for one can't stand that sort of thing. Just put a ballpark price and I can tell imm
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Pricing info is posted here:
http://www.hyperic.com/products/how_to_buy.html [hyperic.com]
Ballpark figures are required for site wide licenses only, and this is because it's not something you can simply post. Some customers have 200 boxes, some have 2000. Hence, the need to develop custom proposals.
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I looked around for a while but couldn't find it.
Mea culpa.
How about a little-known Open Source company? (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux File System?? (Score:5, Funny)
10? (Score:2)
Anybody else notice there are ten companies on this list?
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PETJ (People for the ethical treatment of journalists)
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excerpts (Score:5, Informative)
Cleversafe
The Linux File System, which lets Linux computers store information on a dispersed storage grid called the Cleversafe Research Storage Grid. The company plans to offer commercial dispersed-data storage services and software.
Digium
Asterisk, the industry's first open source PBX, and Asterisk Business Edition, a professional grade version of the software.
Hyperic
Hyperic HQ, an open source platform for managing heterogeneous IT environments, including operating systems and Web, application, database, middleware, and virtualization technology. The company also provides subscription-based services and support, as well as advanced features.
Optaros
Consulting and systems integration services focused on open source softwar
Qlusters
OpenQRM, an open source systems management platform.
Sahana
A secure Web portal that includes applications used to coordinate and collaborate during relief efforts following disasters.
WSO2
Tungsten, an Apache-based open source application server built from the ground up to handle Web services. The company is planning to roll out a line of Web-services-focused, Apache-based middleware, with its Titanium Enterprise Service Bus due for release soon.
Zenoss
Open source network and systems-monitoring software.
Zmanda
A commercial version of the open source AMANDA (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) backup utility software, as well as services and support for the software.
10 companies (rPath hard to find) (Score:2)
Plus the author must have missed it, cus there's actually 10 companies.
rPath
rBuilder, an open source platform that includes a tailored version of Linux to create preconfigured, pretested application appliances that can be downloaded and deployed by enterprise users in minutes.
Here's a fun game (Score:2, Funny)
Cleversafe (Score:4, Funny)
Plus free, shameless advertisement through Slashdot:
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday April 26 [slashdot.org]
Posted by Zonk on Monday August 21 [slashdot.org]
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday August 28 [slashdot.org]
ZManda, hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Because some worlds are just naturally classier than others. I'd hate to get their Underworld-class support.
A little spammy (Score:2)
But why force me to read 8 pages? Each page has roughly 25 lines of real content and less than 250 words. That and 301 links all designed to get their 25 line articles at the top of the SE li
db4o (Score:1)
Open-Source Object Database for Java and
I'll never use an O/R mapping tool again.
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With that many buzzwords in its description alone, it has to be good.
"Over 800 downloads" - so? (Score:2)
Some people will download anything. I used to have a program on one of my web sites that was a plug-in to a high-end animation package. It was totally useless unless you had that package, and knew how to run it, which few people did. Thousands of people downloaded the plug-in, despite clear statements that it was useless without the main package. They'd even fill out the registration form.
Why oh why must open source use such bad names? (Score:2, Interesting)
What? (Score:1)
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CardMeeting is built using many open source libraries, but then again, what isn't these days?
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are you absolutely certain that you have not used any GPL libs in your stuff??
if you have then you will be releasing your complete source code
(and yes im certain that folks will be running debuggers and hexeditors to find out if you have)
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BSD and Apache basically place very few restrictions on the use of their software. I can include apache or BSD licensed libraries it in my products, and I don't have to cough up the source code to the libraries or my code even if I make changes to the libraries, etc. On the other hand, GPL says that, if I distribute binaries, I need to cough up the source code to my ENTIRE PRO
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