Awesome Open Company

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 are available.

Table of contents

1. What is an open company?
2. Companies
3. Resources
4. Books
5. Articles
6. Videos
7. Similar lists
8. License

What is an open company?

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

Companies

Company	Openness Pledge	Open Product	Statement	Open Finance
Aleph Objects	link	N/A
Arduino LLC	Arduino - Introduction	:octocat:Arduino
Atlassian	Company values — Atlassian	N/A
Axem	DEM	:octocat:DEM
Balsamiq	Company — Balsamiq	N/A
Bevry	Bevry	DocPad
Buffer	Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more	:octocat:Misc	Why we have a core value of transparency at our startup	Revenue
Clarify	Clarify - Launch and manage your career	N/A
CodeCombat	CodeCombat - Learn how to code by playing a game	:octocat:CodeCombat	Why you should open-source your startup
Couchbase	Open Source Projects	:octocat:All Products
Dangerous Prototypes	About - DP	Projects
Documenso	The Documenso Manifest	:octocat:Documenso	Announcing Open Metrics	Open Metrics
Dreamwidth	About Dreamwidth Studios	:octocat:Dreamwidth
Elastic	Openness, transparency, and collaboration are at the heart of all that we do.	:octocat:Misc
GitLab	About Us — GitLab	GitLab
Gratipay	Welcome to Gratipay	:octocat:All Products	The first open company	Finance
Growstuff	(archive) Values - Growstuff Wiki	:octocat:Growstuff	Why Growstuff is open source
MapBox	Open Source - MapBox	:octocat:Misc
Neocities	(archive) Neocities - stats	:octocat:Neocities.org	The first Neocities Open Company report
New Vector	Work in the open	:octocat:Misc
Niteo	Niteo Handbook	:octocat:Pareto Security
OpenCraft	OpenCraft — Open edX Development & Hosting Services	N/A
ProtonMail	ProtonMail is Open Source!	Web Client; OpenPGPjs	ProtonMail Open Source Cryptography
Read the Docs	Read the Docs Open Source Philosophy	:octocat:readthedocs.org		Funding
Red Hat	Red Hat Jobs - Our culture	Misc
RStudio	What makes RStudio different?	RStudio - About
Sentry	About Sentry	Sentry	Driven by Open Source
SoftwareMill	40 CEOs in 1 company	:octocat:Misc		Open finances
Tessel	Open Source - Tessel	:octocat:Tessel
Transloadit	Open Source	:octocat:Uppy	Jobs & Culture
wemake.services	wemake-services/meta § Purpose	:octocat:wemake.services
Watermelon	Promoting Openness, Starting With the Codebase	:octocat:Watermelon

Resources

Books

• Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams: Wikinomics
• James M. Whitehurst: The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
• The Open Organization Field Guide

Articles

• 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

Videos

• BetterMeans introduction

Similar lists

• The Open Company Initiative directory (OCI): A group of companies which explicitly adopted OCI's openness pledge
  • (dormant)
• 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)
• Awesome Open: A curated list of organizations, projects and initiatives that maintain open codebases and datasets

License

This work and all contributions to it are released into the public domain under the terms of the CC0 1.0.