People Who Built Businesses Around Open-Source Software

From university code to companies. Stonebraker led the Ingres and then Postgres database projects at Berkeley, releasing their code under permissive licences, and repeatedly founded companies to commercialise the research, starting with Relational Technology in 1980. Postgres later grew, through volunteers who added SQL support, into the community-run PostgreSQL. His career shows the academic route from open research code to commercial products. He won the Turing Award in 2014.

Support contracts for free tools. Tiemann co-founded Cygnus Support in 1989 with John Gilmore and David Henkel-Wallace, the first company built purely around selling services for free software. Customers paid Cygnus to port, fix and support the GNU compiler and debugger for their chips, while improvements went back to the GNU project. Red Hat bought Cygnus in 1999, and Tiemann went on to help lead Red Hat's open-source strategy.

Packaging Linux. Ewing, a programmer, put together his own Linux distribution in the early 1990s, named after the red cap he wore at university, and in 1995 merged his work with Bob Young's distribution business to form Red Hat. Its package manager, RPM, made installing and updating software on Linux manageable. The distribution assembled code written by thousands of Linux and GNU contributors.

Selling a brand on free code. Young, a Canadian who sold Linux CDs and books by mail, co-founded Red Hat with Marc Ewing and argued that a company could make money selling confidence, a trusted brand, testing and support, around software anyone could copy. Red Hat's 1999 share listing was one of the dot-com era's biggest debuts. He later founded the self-publishing site Lulu.

Governing shared projects. Behlendorf was a core member of the group that coordinated patches to the NCSA web server in 1995 and turned it into Apache, which became the most widely used web server, and he helped create the Apache Software Foundation to own the project neutrally. He then co-founded CollabNet to sell tools for collaborative development and later led the Hyperledger blockchain project at the Linux Foundation.

Hardware and hosting for open source. Augustin co-founded VA Research in 1993 to sell computers preloaded with Linux, and attended the 1998 meeting where the term open source was chosen. As VA Linux, the company listed in 1999 with a record first-day share price rise, then collapsed in the dot-com crash. Its SourceForge site, which hosted code for hundreds of thousands of free projects, outlasted the hardware business.

Dual licensing. Mickos, a Finnish executive, ran MySQL AB from 2001 to its sale to Sun Microsystems in 2008, growing it on a dual-licence model: the database was free under the GPL for anyone who shared their own code, while companies embedding it in closed products bought a commercial licence. The code itself was largely written by Michael Widenius and the founding team. Sun paid about a billion dollars.

A free desktop funded by its founder. Shuttleworth, who made his fortune selling the security firm Thawte, founded Canonical in 2004 to produce Ubuntu, a Linux distribution built on Debian's volunteer work with regular releases and a promise to stay free of charge. Canonical earns money from support and services for businesses and cloud servers, where Ubuntu became widespread. Some Debian and desktop users objected to its occasional unilateral decisions.

A non-profit with a commercial arm. Baker, a lawyer who wrote the Mozilla Public Licence at Netscape, helped set up the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 and its taxable subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, which shipped Firefox. Most of its income came from deals making a search engine the browser's default, chiefly Google, an awkward dependence for an organisation promoting an open web. Firefox's market share fell sharply under her later leadership, and she stepped down as chief executive in 2024.

Hosting the open project. Mullenweg co-created WordPress in 2003 and founded Automattic in 2005, which runs WordPress.com, a hosted version, and sells add-ons, while the open-source software stays free for anyone to install. The arrangement relies on thousands of volunteer contributors and on hosting companies building on the code. His 2024 dispute with WP Engine, which he accused of profiting without contributing, tested where a company's interest ends and the project's begins.

Scaling the subscription model. Whitehurst, a former Delta Air Lines executive, led Red Hat from 2008 and grew its model of selling subscriptions to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which give access to certified, tested releases and support while the source code stays open. Red Hat became the first open-source company with over a billion dollars in annual revenue and was bought by IBM for $34 billion in 2019. He wrote The Open Organization about its management.

Open-core cloud services. Ghodsi, a Swedish-Iranian researcher at Berkeley's AMPLab, was among the group around Matei Zaharia that created Apache Spark, an open-source engine for large-scale data processing, and in 2013 they founded Databricks. The company sells a managed cloud platform built around Spark and other open projects such as Delta Lake, while contributing heavily to them. He has been chief executive since 2016.