Arduino LLC need no introduction, all their products are open source and so is the supporting software.

www.mapbox.com

http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/168

Would it make sense to add the Lulzbot to an open product made by Aleph Objects? The printers 100% FOSH.

Dangerous Prototypes started as making a new open source hardware (OSHW) project every month, while that may have been a bit ambitious they do have several popular OSHW electronics projects with accompanying open source software.

For example:

Aleph Objects - redirected to lulzbot.com
New Vector - redirected to element.io

@nobodxbodon Greetings! :-)

Do you have an X/Twitter account? @waldyrious and I were wondering here:

https://twitter.com/waldyrious/status/1730023367720214997

Sentry changed to the non-free, GPL-incompatible, "Business Software License", see https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry
It thus shouldn't act as an example of awesomely open.

In the list of open companies, it's not obvious whether/how they are more than just based on OSS. For example, Buffer has metrics here: https://buffer.baremetrics.com/dashboard. Do you think it's worthwhile to create some dimensions like 'Open finance' now, and maybe 'Open Operation' in the future, with corresponding links? The list will become a table.

This is a follow-up to #25. I think we should make it clearer what the criteria for open companies are, and map them directly to the table columns.

I would suggest, for example, the following list:

• Openness pledge
  • Examples: public commitment to open source; blog post outlining the company's open operation practices and/or the philosophy behind them.
  • Note: the "Statement" column of the table would be merged here.
• Open primary product
  • Examples: open source software (or open source hardware designs) for at least the basic (but still functional) version of the company's primary products or services.
  • Note: the naming change is to make the "primary" part explicit.
• Open development process
  • Examples: public issue trackers or roadmaps; open development-related communication channels (mailing lists, chat rooms, forums, etc.).
  • Note: this was previously called "Open channel", and removed in #36 as it was mostly empty.
• Open finances
  • Examples: public revenue reports; transparent salary information.
  • Note: renamed from "open finance" to "open finances", which sounds more natural to me.

My idea is to have these criteria listed immediately above the table, sort of like a legend, including concrete and illustrative examples for each criteria. This would replace the current "What is an open company" section.

Some questions I have:

1. What other examples could we provide of open primary products? We would want to be able to expand the list beyond mostly software companies, or otherwise explicitly embrace them.
2. What other examples could we have for the "Open finances" criterion?
3. Can we have a clearer/shorter name for the "Open development process" criterion? Or do we rely on the examples to make it clear what we mean?
4. Do we count blog posts for the openness pledge, or stick to stand-alone pages on the companies' websites? And what do we do about single-page sites or highly dynamic ones that don't allow deep linking straight to the openness pledge part?
5. Should we include companies with an openness pledge if none of the other criteria are fulfilled? I.e. those who "talk the talk but don't walk the walk"? Conversely, do we want to include the opposite? I.e. companies that, for instance, release their products as open source but nowhere make their commitment to openness explicit.
6. As a follow-up to the previous question: do we make any of the criteria mandatory, or simply require at least one/two of them to be fulfilled, regardless of which?
7. Can we somehow incorporate open/democratic management practices as well? I.e. worker-owned cooperatives and similar flat hierarchical arrangements. Should we? That is, would it be in-scope for our project to count openness within the companies, or focus in how the companies interface with the external environment?

They seem to be quite open, but lack an explicit general pledge to transparency and open operations. Some relevant info (emphasis mine):

From https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/07/salary-transparency:

Along with much of the tech community, we were impressed with Buffer’s boldness and leadership in salary transparency. So… We’ve created a salary and skills calculator for Stack Overflow’s engineering, design and product roles. This has been transparent internally for a while; now it’s transparent with you.

Those who know Stack Overflow know that we work hard to work in public. This is a continuation of that tradition.

We hope that moves like this will inspire other employers to greater transparency. (...) We believe that conventions can change. If more companies become open on salary, perhaps openness will become expected.

Our salary calculator doesn’t cover every role at Stack Overflow. It doesn’t include equity, and doesn’t address currencies other than USD. In the spirit of “default public”, we would rather share an incomplete system than not share at all.

From https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pay-developers/:

We want to offer (...) compensation that is fair, easily understood, transparent, and competitive.

(...)

Transparent reflects Stack Exchange’s core beliefs about running our business in the open, without secrets. It means that if a list of everyone’s salary suddenly appeared on Wikileaks, nobody would be surprised enough to be upset. Transparency is essential to insure fairness.

(...)

One important principle of Stack Exchange is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do. In that spirit I've uploaded a complete copy of the current compensation plan so you can see what goes into compensation decisions at Stack Exchange. The only thing that is not public is the actual, final computation that determines each individual's paycheck, because we have to balance our own philosophy of openness against the individual developer's right to personal privacy.

Open core product: https://github.com/chef/chef, https://docs.chef.io/chef_license.html.

Open development process: and https://docs.chef.io/community_contributions.html.

No explicit openness pledge though. The about page is titled "Our Mission and Values", but makes no mention of, for instance, their open source products.

Aleph Objects make the Lulzbot 3D printer and have been endorsed by the FSF.

It can be valuable to highlight the products and services from the open companies that may be applied for free or a discount by those who are open/nonprofit etc. Balsamiq for instance.

It's missing a page on the website explaining its commitment to openness/transparency principles. (see the guidelines). There's a blog post which goes into this, but it's buried in the archives rather than featured as one of the pages directly reachable from the site's navigation.

Pinging @LightTable (hope this works) for feedback.

Just noticed some broken links and seems some are out of business. For example, Clarify is down, and here's archive of its blogs.

Shall we move them to a different table, and add some archive links, so that people can learn some history if interested?

In addition, how about fetch other data from the current open companies, and visualize some statistics over time plus some recent news in a github page maybe, so that people can feel the progress and challenge in the open community?

Hello, I wrote a tool that can validate README links (valid URLs, not duplicate). It can be run when someone submits a pull request.

It is currently being used by

• https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-ios
• https://github.com/matteocrippa/awesome-swift
• https://github.com/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps

Examples

• https://travis-ci.org/matteocrippa/awesome-swift/builds/96526196 ok ✅
• https://travis-ci.org/matteocrippa/awesome-swift/builds/96722421 link redirected / rename 🔴
• https://travis-ci.org/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps/builds/96763135 bad link / project deleted 🔴
• https://travis-ci.org/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps/builds/95754715 dupe 🔴

If you are interested, connect this repo to https://travis-ci.org/ and add a .travis.yml file to the project.

See https://github.com/dkhamsing/awesome_bot for options, more information
Feel free to leave a comment 😄

Lacking an explicit openness/transparency page, even though it's tacitly known that they value those principles. The about page doesn't mention anything; there's a blog post but it's not something permanent and easily findable (e.g. from the site's navigation menu).

Pinging @reddit (hope this works) for feedback.

Conversation already started in this discussion in the Beeminder forum. /cc @dreeves

The commitment to openness isn't very explicit, which is the benchmark we're using to add companies to the list. There's this page/video, but it is not easily findable (should be something accessible with 1-2 clicks from the home page).

Pinging @acquia for feedback (not sure organization pings work, though)

https://www.balancedpayments.com/

Remove it from the list ?

3D Robotics have open source products and also steward Arducopter I believe.

Coming from our experiences with @TransforMap, I propose to add the @enspiral Cooperative, too.

I think ProtonMail is qualified and meets the criteria I've seen on the readme.

• Website: https://protonmail.com
• Openness Pledge: https://protonmail.com/security-details
• Open Product: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient / https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs
• Statement: https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-open-source-crytography/
• Open Finance: n/a

What do you guys think? There are many other relevant links as well to support this nomination but tried to only post the ones that are the closest match to each one of these categories. Cheers.

Tessel makes open source hardware and is very open in their governance.

See: https://www.elastic.co/about/why-open-source

Developers of elementary OS

Openness pledge: https://elementary.io/en/open-source
Open core product: https://elementary.io
Open development process: https://github.com/elementary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_business, possibly others.

As discussed in #27.

In an announcement from 15 Jan 2015 in their email newsletter, related to this news, they wrote:

"(...) the need for an independent, open alternative will be even greater in the future and that’s what we are playing to become. Independent, untied, and true to our guidelines of being “as open as possible without jeopardizing operating as a business”. Open data and open source are in our blood and we will keep pushing the limits there.

It would be nice if they put some of that language in your manifesto or in the about page, to conform to the inclusion guidelines. Currently all I could find was this blog post about the license change (dropping the non-commercial restriction):

This now means we have a true open data license and that we are welcoming people to use our photos. Our guiding principle remains the same: maximize sharing and use of all our photos without totally compromising us building a sustainable business.

/cc @jesolem, @gyllen, @peterneubauer

(Issue originally posted at opencompany/www.opencompany.org#150)

https://github.com/vector-im

https://vector.im/ (single-page website)

Work in the open

Almost all of the software written at New Vector is open source. Everything you do will be out in the open, you will be supported not only by your colleagues, but also by a huge community just as passionate about the project as you are.

What is Matrix.org?

Matrix is an open network for secure decentralized communication. Matrix.org publishes the open specification of the protocol, as well as open source reference servers, client SDKs, bridges, etc.

What is Riot.im?

Riot is a flagship client for the Matrix network, focusing on collaboration for teams and communities and showcasing Matrix's end-to-end encryption. Available on Web, Desktop, iOS & Android, Riot is entirely open source.

Who are New Vector?

New Vector is a for-profit startup that builds Riot as well as employing many of the core Matrix.org team. New Vector exists to grow and support the Matrix ecosystem.

How does New Vector make money?

New Vector makes money through providing paid Matrix hosting and services (coming soon!) as well as consultancy services to those building on Matrix.

How can I learn more about working at New Vector?

Since almost everything we do is open source on Github (matrix-org and vector.im) you can get a good feel for exactly what it would be like to work on these projects. Similarly joining dev-centric channels such as #matrix-dev:matrix.org provides a window into the core team and the community. Come and say hi!

Additional background, from the Matrix.org FAQ:

Who is funding Matrix.org?

[...]

For the first three years of Matrix’s development (2014-2017), most of the core contributors worked for Amdocs, who paid for them to work fulltime on Matrix. In July 2017, Amdocs considered the project to be sufficiently successful that it could now self-support and so stopped funding. The majority of the core team is now employed by New Vector, an independent company set up to hire the team and support Matrix’s development. Other contributors are funded by their own employers or donate their own time to the project.