Comments on: OSBC: Opening my mind

By: Paul Cooper

Paul Cooper — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:04:03 +0000

Firebird the DB which was a Borland product, InterBase. They decided to get on the OSS bandwagon ~2000, not fully realising they would be giving up control, ended up backtracking on the OSS thing after the initial release, thereby losing any control or influence they might have gained by doing it properly.

So while Borland isn’t quite dead yet, their interest in having IB open is – Firebird is a fork of the code they released, and while it’s often overlooked and forgotten behind MySQL and Postgres it still seems to have a small but healthy community around it.

By: Jon Kåre Hellan

Jon Kåre Hellan — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:15:09 +0000

Abiword hadn’t got far before Abisource folded, so that puts it in a different category.

But don’t forget X11. I don’t think it was ever a company, but it started out as an industry funded consortium.

By: Bassam

Bassam — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:02:11 +0000

blender! (http://www.blender.org) as I’m sure your aware is a massive success since the death of NaN, it’s commercial company. However, Blender was not free/opensource during the commercial era, it only became so after.
Interestingly enough, it was the blender ‘community’ – the thousands of people who had downloaded the free/closed source version – who paid the 100k euro (or most of it) needed to free the sources from NaN’s creditors. So maybe there is something (sometimes) to counting community bigger than the core developers.
Blender’s history is quite interesting, and could be a valuable datum for your pattern-identification research.