A community-curated list of awesome open companies, inspired by the many awesome-x lists out there.
(click here to jump straight to the list below.)
Contributions to this list are welcome! Just edit the README.md (this document) and send the changes as a pull request. [Guidelines](../../wiki/Inclusion guidelines) are available.
An open company is defined, for the purposes of this list, as a for-profit organization whose core practices are guided by principles of openness, transparency and interoperability. This philosophy can be summarized by the maxim:
Share as much as possible, charge as little as possible.
derived from the original formulation by Gittip (now Gratipay).
In practice, this often means:
- releasing its products as free and open source software, open content, or open source hardware
- using open standards and inter-operable formats
- developing its products openly, using public communication channels
- publishing as much financial and operational data as possible, without compromising customer privacy.
- etc.
The following pages provide a more detailed overview of this concept:
- Open business: Wikipedia article
- Open business: from the P2P Foundation wiki
(in alphabetical order, with optional announcement blog posts)
Aleph Objects
Arduino LLC
Atlassian
Balanced ("Why I made my payments startup an open company")
Balsamiq
Buffer ("Why we have a core value of transparency at our startup")
CodeCombat ("Why you should open-source your startup")
Couchbase
Dangerous Prototypes
Dreamwidth
GitLab
Gratipay ("The first open company")
Growstuff ("Why Growstuff is open source")
Neocities ("The first Neocities Open Company report")
The Open Company
OpenCraft
Red Hat
Reddit ("Reddit goes open source")
Tessel
- Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams: Wikinomics
- Paul Graham: What business can learn from open source
- Massimo Menichinelli: Business models for open hardware
- Roger Clarke: Open source software and open content as models for ebusiness
- Chris Anderson: A business model for open source hardware
- The Economist: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual
- Chad Whitacre: The second open company
- Timothy Cook: Why open companies? A new culture of business
- Shereef Bishay: The open enterprise manifesto
- The Open Company Initiative directory (OCI):
A group of companies which adopted the OCI pledge
- (can't be updated by the community, only by the companies themselves)
- The Open 100: a competition held in 2009-2010 to find the top 100 open innovation companies
- (defunct — these links are from the Web Archive)
- The VAR Guy's The Open Source 50 (2009 list, 2010 list, 2012 update)
- (unmaintained)
This work and all contrubitions to it are released into the public domain under the terms of the CC0 1.0.