Products The Internet is full of open-source software in heavy commercial use. Our favorite examples, discussed elsewhere, include: Apache, which runs over 50% of the world's web servers. Perl, which is the engine behind most of the "live content" on the World Wide Web. BIND, the software that provides the DNS (domain name service) for the entire Internet. sendmail, the most important and widely used email transport software on the Internet. DNS and sendmail are especially interesting because they're "category killers"; not only are they extremely capable and robust, they're so good that no commercial competition has ever been successful at replacing them as the most widely used product on their respective categories. On this page, though, we focus on a narrower category; we list the vendors who are actually selling open-source-based solutions successfully, or have committed to doing so in the near future. To exclude economically trivial examples, this page lists only companies with a run rate of at least a million dollars a year. If you know of one that ought to be added, tell us. IBM In mid-June 1998, IBM chose the open-source Apache webserver to support and bundle with its WebSphere suite. It has since released the Secure Mailer in open source and launched the AlphaWorks site to disseminate cutting-edge IBM technology in source. Apple Computers In March of 1999, Apple released the core layers of Mac OS X Server as an open source BSD operating system called Darwin. Apple was the first mainstream computer company to build its future around open source, and is partnering with the Apache Group, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and other open source developers to work on evolving the Mac OS X platform. Apple has expanded its involvement by open sourcing the QuickTime Streaming Server in April, and the OpenPlay network gaming toolkit in May. SGI SGI has long funded prominent open source contributors, made many hardware donations (including big servers), and shown general friendliness toward open source. It sponsors the Samba project (an NT compatible file/print server running on all Unix systems that outperforms the Microsoft NT server), a port of Linux to SGI/MIPS machines, and is open-sourcing GLX (OpenGL extensions to X11) In August 1999 SGI open-sourced the XFS journaling file system. SGI promises this trend will continue and strengthen in the future with even more significant contributions, and has launched an open-source site. Cygnus Solutions, Inc. One of the pioneers in open-source software products (including GNUPro Toolkit and eCos – embedded Cygnus operating system), Cygnus is the leading commercial provider of Open Source-based software development tools, support, and custom engineering. Cyclades, Inc. Cyclades manufactures multiport-serial and networking cards. They have a long history of cooperating with the open-source world. Their drivers for Linux, freeBSD, BSD/OS, and DOS are open-source. Linux Mall Linux Mall is a clearinghouse where Linux users and commercial software developers can find each other. The breadth of the Mall's product line and its sales volume have been skyrocketing since the company's inception. The Mall's sales suggest that Linux is already the number two operating system in the world, and their sales projections show Linux's user base rivalling Microsoft's within a few years. Red Hat Software An extremely successful Linux vendor. They expect to ship 400,000 paid copies of Red Hat Linux in 1998, and believe this may represent as little as 10% of their total volume, meaning there could be as many as four million copies installed before 1999. Their sales have doubled every year since 1995. Riverace Corporation Riverace sells support for an open-source product, Adaptive Communications Environment (ACE), a powerful C++ class library and communications software framework. This product is used by several thousand people developing communications software and embedded systems. Paid support licensees include Lucent Technologies and Sandia National Laboratories. The source and documentation for this library is publicly available on the Riverace web site. C2Net Software, Inc. C2Net Software uses two popular open-source packages in its commercial product line, Apache and SSLeay. Its Stronghold product, based on both Apache and SSLeay is the number one secure webserver worldwide – it has greater marketshare than either Netscape or Microsoft's offerings, and the company does more than a million dollars a year worth of business. C2Net also sells cryptography-specific products based on SSLeay. Netscape Communications, Inc. On January 22, 1998, Netscape announced its intention to release its client software, including Netscape Communicator and Netscape Navigator, as open source. Netscape is, of course, a Fortune 500 corporation and widely recognized as one of the leading companies in the Internet and software sector. Walnut Creek Software Walnut Creek has built a flourishing business around publishing open-source software. They offer a broad line of CD-ROMS featuring Linux and FreeBSD, graphics and design software, Web tools, programming and development code, desktop-publishing software, and much more. It's worth noting that Walnut Creek relies exclusively on FreeBSD for their huge ftp site (ftp.cdrom.com), which supports up to 5,000 simultaneous user connections. This ftp site holds the record for busiest site, having transferred a terabyte worth of files in a single day. Cobalt Microserver, Inc. Cobalt Microserver makes an extremely capable, low-cost, small-form-factor Web server appliance called the Cobalt Qube. These things are apparently selling like hotcakes. Cobalt has announced full support for the open-source model and released its Linux port for the MIPS chip to the net. This product won the PC Magazine's Editors' Choice Award for workgroup servers. Whistle Communications, Inc. Whistle Communications builds an all-in-one Internet Appliance called the InterJet; it won PC Computing's 1997 Most Valuable Product Best Networking Hardware award. The concept for the InterJet is that it provides everything a small office needs to get up and productive on the Internet – including full networking and firewall functionality integrated with mail, web and file service. The InterJet combines some of the high end capabilities from various Open Source projects with a system design that delivers on ease of use and administration by non-technical users. The InterJet is based on FreeBSD, Apache, Samba and NetATalk, and Whistle has used and contributed to several open-source projects since 1996./ Caldera, Inc. (To be added.) Corel Corel Corporation produces an award-winning Linux distribution, and has committed to porting its entire office suite to the Linux operating system; in the process they are contributing to the Wine project, an open-source win16 and win32 porting library and emulation system for Unix-like operating systems. ArsDigita ArsDigita distributes open-source toolkits for building online communities and for maintaining reliable RDBMS-backed Web services. The ArsDigita Foundation encourages young people to develop open-source non-commercial Web services with an annual $10,000 prize. ActiveState ActiveState is a privately-held corporation with investors that include O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ActiveState leads the industry in providing professional tools for Perl developers, and introduced Perl 5 to the Win32 environment. ActiveState is committed to supporting both the open source and commercial communities by contributing a wide range of free binary run-time products, providing professional tools for Perl developers and supporting corporate customers' need for reliability and stability. Lutris Technologies Lutris provides strategic Internet consulting services and technologies to corporate IT organizations and high-technology clients. We build custom Internet strategies, environments, and applications for large and small companies. Enhydra, a Java application server built by Lutris, has become their customer's preference for the application server +foundation used in virtually all of their engagements. On January 15th, Lutris announced their contribution of Enhydra to the open-source community through the sponsoring of the organization, Enhydra.org. Sleepycat Software, Inc. Sleepycat Software builds, distributes, and supports Berkeley DB, the open-source embedded database system. Berkeley DB offers programmers reliable, scalable database services with very little overhead. It has a small footprint and requires virtually no database administration by end users. Sleepycat's customers include many of the leading open-source projects, as well as Fortune 500 companies whose own products are proprietary. The complete source code for Berkeley DB is available for download from Sleepycat's Web site. Covalent Technologies Covalent Technologies develops commercial software enhancements for the Apache Web server platform and provides full commercial support packages for Apache. Covalent maintains its role as a founding member of the Apache Project and actively participates in the research, development and administrative efforts of the Apache Software Foundation.

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