Success Stories

Open source software is not a niche product. In fact, this very book is a product created with open source software, such as Git for collaboration and version management, Firefox for editing and most likely Apache or nginx on a Linux web server for content delivery.

There are many success stories in the open source world. Here are a few examples:

  • Apache Software Foundation: The Apache Software Foundation is responsible for the Apache software projects. One of the most-well known Apache projects is the Apache HTTP Server, the world's most widely used web server software. The relevance of the Apache projects becomes apparent if you look at the companies supporting the Apache Software Foundation (e.g. Google, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo).
  • LibreOffice: This is an open source office suite published and maintained by The Document Foundation. It is based on OpenOffice.org, from which it was forked in 2010, which was originally an open-sourced version of StarOffice. LibreOffice enjoys quite a large user community and is a common alternative to proprietary products.
  • Linux: Linux is one of the most prominent examples of open source projects. From its first release in 1991, it has become a widely used operating system. Popular platforms such as Android rely on the Linux kernel.
  • Web browsers: Two of the most popular projects rely on open source licenses. Mozilla Firefox is available under the Mozilla Public License. The Chrome browser published by Google is distributed as freeware, however, significant parts of its source code are available as a project called Chromium under the BSD license.

In the geospatial community, two projects for offering map services contribute to/publish open source software and are the basis for a software as a service business model as well.

  • CartoDB offers services to create and host maps on the Web as a freemium service. However, interested users may access the platform implementation as an open source package to install their own instance or to modify it.
  • MapBox offers similar services to CartoDB's. Significant modules of this platform have been published as open source software. Furthermore, MapBox has contributed to many other open source projects.

Different organizations needing a certain functionality can team-up to fund the necessary developments. An example hereof is the 52°North Sensor Observation Service (SOS) implementation. This Web service allows users to publish measurement data/sensor data on the Web through a standardized interface. Several partners and (research) projects contributed either funding for 52° North developers or code to develop this component. Due to recent legal obligations, various European countries need a tool to report their air quality measurements in a standardized format to the European Environment Agency (EEA). To get the necessary 52°North SOS enhancements, several countries (i.e. Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom) have teamed up to fund the development (see also Streamlining European air quality data reporting and exchange via SOS 4.3). This is an excellent example of how different stakeholders can join forces to advance open source software.

Open Hub offers a variety of metrics to assess open source projects: their popularity, activities, etc.

Overviews of successful open source projects are available: