Curated list of awesome lists
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
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 | |
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 | |
Dreamwidth | About Dreamwidth Studios | :octocat:Dreamwidth | |
Elastic | Why Open Source? | :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 | | |
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 |
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
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.