Open source software has become a mainstream concept for companies. Typically, software gets more attention when companies offer it publicly. This means that developers can contribute to the software and become ambassadors for the product.

Open source companies most often derive revenue from training, certification, consulting or support services or other paid products or hosting services.

This article introduces ten popular open source products and the companies behind them. Most importantly, we also looked at how these companies are sustaining their businesses through open source software.

1. MySQL database

MySQL database was developed in 1995, looking for a higher performance, more efficient data storage mechanism. MySQL was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 2000. MySQL AB, the company that owns the MySQL rights, is actively committed to product improvement and support.

Today, we can’t imagine the Internet without the MySQL database. It is one of the most popular databases in the world. It got a huge boost in popularity when it was introduced with the LAMP stack. It is a four-tier stack that forms the basis for hosting Web sites and running Web applications:

  • Linux: operating system
  • Apache: Web server software
  • MySQL: Database layer used to store and query data
  • PHP: The final layer for building Web sites and Web applications.

Finally, MySQL AB makes money with its enterprise product for companies that need to expand and can’t afford to fail. They provide different types of service level agreements to assist companies in operating and maintaining MySQL databases.

2. Apache HTTP server

We’ve introduced Apache as part of the LAMP stack, which also includes MySQL. Apache HTTP Server software has existed since 1996. Some say that over 67% of the world’s Web servers use Apache HTTP Server. However, its popularity is declining as alternative products emerge that require a share of the market, such as Nginx.

The software itself is developed by an open community of developers who are also responsible for maintaining the software. Please note that Apache Foundation does not make money. They receive income from donations and events to pay for their day-to-day business. Their core goal is to promote the use of open source software. However, developers working on projects often negotiate with the company to resolve critical issues or resolve complex use cases. As you’ve guessed, companies are more than happy to hire experts to solve problems.

WordPress via Automattic

Automattic, based in San Francisco, Calif., manages WordPress, a popular open source content management system. WordPress supports 40% of all websites on the Internet, according to Kinsta.com. Notably, WordPress’s share has continued to grow from 31% since 2018.

On top of that, Automattic also runs WordPress.com, which lets you host free CMS instances. Automattic also manages two popular plugins for WordPress:

  • WooCommerce: Helps you build an online store
  • BuddyPress: Helps you build social networking sites

WordPress makes money by selling advertising space on the free sites they offer to users. Most importantly, they provide upgrades for sites that need more storage space, custom domain names, or better performance. Users have to pay for these upgrades, and that’s how WordPress makes its money.

4. Canonical的Ubuntu

Canonical is the company behind perhaps the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu. They are based in London and employ more than 500 people. They launched the popular Linux distribution in 2004.

But why did they develop Ubuntu? From Ubuntu.com, we can read the following story. “Linux has been around since 2004, but it is divided into proprietary and unsupported community versions, and for most computer users, free software is not part of everyday life. At that time, Mark Shuttleworth assembled a small team of Debian developers who co-founded Canonical and set out to create an easy-to-use Linux desktop called Ubuntu.

Their goal is to provide everyone in the world with free software access to create new ideas and innovate. Most importantly, they want to reduce costs for companies that use Ubuntu on a large scale. Canonical offers services such as support, management, maintenance and operations – revenues from these services fund its operations and Ubuntu’s ongoing development.

5. MuleSoft data integration platform

MuleSoft, also based in San Francisco, provides a data integration platform that allows companies to connect data, applications and devices across different environments. It’s an open source product that Was acquired by Salesforce in 2018 for $6.5 billion.

MuleSoft’s open source product has several revenue streams:

  • Subscribe to the content
  • Consulting services and employee training programs
  • Technical Support Services
  • Certification test

6. The red hat

Founded in 1993, Red Hat is best known for its Enterprise operating system called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In late 2018, Red Hat was acquired by IBM for a whopping $34 billion.

In 2018, a TechRepublic article was titled “Here’s Red Hat’s Open Secret on How to Make $3B Sell Free Stuff.” The company believes it can no longer win with open source platforms. Plus, they make a lot of money from open source products through various revenue streams like MuleSoft:

  • Subscription-based customer service
  • A training course
  • Integrated service
  • Consulting services

7. The chef

Chef has become a popular tool for writing system configuration recipes to easily start large systems. In other words, they eliminated much of the manual work of DevOps teams by providing automated configuration management and even integration with popular security tools, thus giving birth to DevSecOps.

They provide a chef community that hosts thousands of freely available configuration templates to start resources. In addition, they provide training services and a suite of enterprise solutions for compliance, infrastructure management and application delivery.

8. Jenkins by CloudBees

CloudBees is the company behind Jenkins, the popular continuous integration pipeline software. Jenkins’ goal is to speed application delivery through automated testing, deployment, and many other development-related processes.

CloudBees makes its money by offering other DevOps products and by supporting Jenkins.

Apache Kafka for Confluent

Apache Kafka is a framework implementation of a software bus that uses stream processing. It is an open source software platform written in Scala and Java by the Apache Software Foundation. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for processing real-time data feeds.

Apache Kafka provides a high-throughput platform for handling real-time data feeds, such as processing financial transactions or monitoring shipping. The technology is most popular among companies that process large data streams and require fast processing times.

Confluent’s business model relies on a commercially supported version of Apache Kafka.

10. ElasticSearch for NV

Elastic NV is the company behind many products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash. Together, these three products form the ELK stack. Their most popular product, Elasticsearch, is a distributed, multi-tenant, full-text search engine that also provides an API for querying data. Many large organizations such as Netflix, Tinder, and Wikipedia use Elasticsearch for their high-performance search capabilities.

Most of Elastic’s revenue comes from its public cloud hosting services, which are available from major cloud providers. However, companies can always decide to host Elasticsearch and other Elastic products themselves.

If you want to learn more about open source companies, check out Databricks, Hashicorp, Cloudera or Docker.