50 Open Source Success Stories in Business, Education, and Government

In a world where everything technological is overhyped, the word “revolution” is thrown about easily, with declaring the latest electronic toy or fly-by-night software advance “earth-moving” seemingly a race among media outlets and advertising venues.

The sobriquet is often applied to open source technology as well, but this stuff may actually deserve the title.

After all, open source goes against tradition in terms of business culture, research and development techniques, principles of ownership, and even overriding philosophy. Meanwhile, burgeoning in universities is the study of not only how to use open source but how the technology works to develop viable product at all.

Today, we present a rundown of success stories from all spheres that open source touches. Whether through profit margins, spreading the technology to areas thought well outside its reach (check out stories regarding the open-source car project and the open-source film production), or just simply generating greater public awareness, the success of this truly world-changing technology is everywhere.

1. The secret of success in open source…

This figures to be the world’s shortest-ever top 50 list. Over at InfoWorld, they’re ready to spill “the secret of successful open source companies,” namely that “the real measure of a successful open source company is its ability to convert whatever volume of downloads/would-be customers it has.” (Oops.) This flies in the face of convention, which says that open source is a “volume game.”

2. …and even one concrete example

In the InfoWorld piece is a nice detailing of the download and profit figures for JBoss, a division of RedHat. JBoss has turned almost constant increase in revenue for five years, despite the fact that download multipliers have fluctuated for the company. JBoss revenues were naturally assisted by partnerships with HP and Novell, showing no signs of slowing.

3.Golden on the Golden State

Over at CIO magazine, Navica CEO and author of “Succeeding with Open Source” Bernard Golden described the State of California Air Resources Board’s recent success in moving “pretty aggressively into using open source.” The board uses the LAMP stack to build systems for the department. Quite high on open source, the state has built several other systems, including one to track atmospheric conditions with regarding to global warming.

4.Sugar in Oregon

Golden also mentioned the implementation of SugarCRM Oregon Department of Human Services. The service provider needed a CRM put into place quickly, due to new HIPAA regulations in electronic billing. Believe it or not, Oregon DHS was sold on the idea when an IT engineer surfed the internet, found open-source SugarCRM, downloaded it onto a laptop and showed it around the department the next day. After “a couple of days” configuring, Oregon DHS went live with the system via the same laptop.

5.University of Tokyo set to receive four golds

Setting world records is always so illusory: While becoming one for the books represents the ultimate success over all the competition from all of history, it is the ultimate in fleeting success as well. And speaking of fleeting, fleetingest in the world TODAY are members of the University of Tokyo’s Microsoft Corporation WIDE Project. Internet2 is the host of the continual contest for the world record in land speed of data transfer. WIDE leads in both single-stream and multiple-stream classes of IPv6 and IPv4. In IPv4, the WIDEners are sending stuff at 7.21 gigabits per second. That’s pretty darn quick.

6.Oodles of Moodle

In academia land, one of the more popular forms of open-source is the system known as Moodle. London, UK-based The Open University is currently in the midst of implementing Moodle to the end result of “the largest use of Moodle in the world,” namely a complete student online environment. Moodle is currently employed in some aspects of Open’s distance-learning program and the “comprehensive online student learning environment” promises to be fully operational by February.

7.Moodle at your service

Meanwhile, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education has now in place a full-on “Moodle Service”, which acts as supplement to course material available to College of Education faculty and students and a resource to other university workgroups, workshop participants and communities.

8.Moab in Washington

The Department of Energy has a long history with high-level supernumber-crunching open source. Cluster Resources, Inc. just added a new chapter, its Moab workload and resource management software becoming the choice of the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program standard for use across NNSA’s high-performance computing systems. For just one of oodles of uses of Moab, check out the genetic play with the Sanbonmatsu team in “Computer Simulations of the Ribosome.”

9.An open-source course? Of course

Popular blogger Scott Granneman recently reported that those revolutionary folks over at University of California at Berkeley has begun a course entitled “Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social and Legal Perspectives. The course is cross-listed for the Informatics Systems major as well as an elective for law. Granneman recommends checking out the syllabus’ book list, because “for those of you just interested in the open source movement as a whole, this is a great compendium of readings that’ll keep you busy for a while.”

10.DOE a dear for Internet2

Internet2 announced a partnership with the Department of Energy to provide an ultra-high-speed network for energy researchers. The decision to combine Internet2 in the network with ESnet was based primarily on the high confidence the DOE now has with ESnet; successes with that product are far to well-documented to be summed up here neatly. An eleven-page report is available on the DOE website.

11.Open source laying open the Earth

OpenSees is an exciting new project sponsored by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center and the National Science Foundation which seeks to “improve the modeling and computational simulation in earthquake engineering through open-source development.” Based in Berkeley (hmmm, an earthquake research center located in the San Francisco Bay area…), OpenSees is dedicated to developing technology via the internet, through with a “rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.”

12.A simple recommendation for Ubuntu

Sometimes when writing about open source, this reporter forgets that open source can come into play at home, too. And so, a quiet little success story about one man who found happiness with Ubuntu entitled “Ubuntu at Home” gets mention in the list of successes. And why not? According to the blog entry, the backup, download and install went quickly, and the writer even “danced the happy dance when the wireless connection went flawlessly.” No wonder he says that “Ubuntu is a wonderful OS.”

13.MIT on it early

Wouldn’t you know it; those kids at MIT were out in front quick in open source, too. Way back in March 2000, a group of graduate students in the MIT Media Lab crafted the idea to “create a database, accessible over the Web, that would enable ‘open source’ problem solving among university students and communities in the developing world.” (Note the quotes around “open source” from a 2002 blog entry.) ThinkCycle was born from this group, and built on open source tools such as Linux and the ArsDigita Community System, still exists today as a leading open-source community.

14.Quick success: OSAF

Harvard Business School’s Siobhan O’Mahony, an assistant professor in the negotiation, organizations and markets unit, specializes in open source use by non-profits. When interviewed in the business school’s “Working Knowledge” page, O’Mahony stated that the success of the Open Source Application Foundation as an example of the future’s organizational model. Lotus Software founder Mitch Kapor founded the personal-information manager Chandler; over 33,000 people downloaded the very first release in its first two weeks and OSAF was awarded with a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

15.Here comes the Sun

Hot off the press comes reportage from Sun Microsystem’s open source RISC processor design community, which noted a few milestones had been passed. The “OpenSparc” project’s early milestones include the addition of an UltraSparc T1 port to the 2.6.17 Linux kernel, OpenSPARC-specific Gentoo and Ubuntu distributions, a new single-core UltraSparc design, and the formation of an OpenSPARC community advisory board. Additionally, the Linux community has created a Linux port for the T1 that was added to the mainstream Linux tree as of 2.6.17. Since the T1 and S1 are based on the same SPARC v9 instruction set architecture, the port is expected to support chips based on S1 design.

16. SBCL most successful to Clementson

The presumably eponymous blog entitled “Bill Clementson’s Blog” is ready to declare the “Best Open Source CL Implementation”! And the winner is … SBCL. Sort of. Formerly, Clementson stated that “the PLT Scheme was the Lisp implementation that best met” his criteria. Today, the PLT Scheme is “still a very nice open source Lisp implementation,” but it isn’t a CL.

17.Elephants Dream of … open source?

Elephants Dream is an eleven-minute animated film unlike any other. Not that it carries a new message or demonstrates revolutionary cinematic technique, but that it was made – modeled, animated, rendered, and composited – with open source software. The producers were the Amsterdam, Holland-based Orange Blender Project, and the film was put together in Amsterdam in 2005-2006. Elephants Dream is available on DVD from Orange Blender.

18.Vroom!

But film is nothing. How about an open source car? No, even better: How about a green-minded open-source car? The NYU-based project OSCar has set out to do just that, with the ultimate goal simply to design and build a car via internet. This automobile has caught the imaginations of techies worldwide, with London’s Daily Telegraph praising the idea in an article entitled “The Open Source Car – Unconventional Wisdom for Sustainability” and the German-language version of wikipedia carrying an article about the phenomenon.

19.One fierce SleepyCat

The biggest success in open source developer databases? Says the opinion of Lauren Rudd at IT Manager’s Journal, it’s Sleepycat. Sleepycat is the privately-held firm that developed Berkeley DB for Oracle. Sleepycat was founded in 1996 and, notes Rudd, has pretty much been profitable since the go. According to Rudd, Sleepycat employs a unique financial method, too: The firm “has not just refrained from using venture capital, the company does not even borrow money to finance its development. The company funds itself entirely from the profits it receives from its license fees.”

20.Packt’s magic five

Industry-related publishing house Packt recently announced its nominees for the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award. The awards were designed to “encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors. The nominees are: Drupal; e107; Joomla!; Plone; and Xoops.

21.Calling Dr. Linux…Dr. Linux, stat

When Midland Memorial in Midland, Texas, took on open source-based electronic health record-keeping, it became the first community hospital in America to do so. Deployed was Medsphere Systems’ OpenVista, a Linux-based EHR platform with roots in the highly acclaimed Open Source Vista system originally developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. According to company statistics, “The resulting OpenVista EHR platform has the VA’s 20 years of development and implementation at more than 1,300 sites behind it, providing a mature solution with real-world success, but without the $18 million price tag that Midland encountered when investigating proprietary products.” Indeed, even before going live, Midland Memorial had made money on the deal, spending $7.1 million on the implementation.

22.Now entering the Medsphere

The Medsphere OpenVista EHR platform was also installed last month at seven West Virginia state-operated acute care hospitals, psychiatric hospitals and long-term care facilities. The Bureau for Behavior Health and Health Facilities of West Virginia’s Department of Health and Human Resources selected Medsphere to supply and deploy its OpenVista software suite in order to create a complete electronic repository of patient information. “Vista has been one of the great healthcare success stories in recent years,” stated Medsphere CEO Kenneth W. Kizer, MD MPH. It seems so.

23.Success by the numbers

A frequently banded-about name among industry press corps is SugarCRM. The commercial open source CRM software provider has seen downloads doubling from 400,000 to 800,000 in six months and a Microsoft partnership highlighting its growth. Since that time, Sugar Open Source has been downloaded in 41 languages, and more than 5,000 developers have contributed over 220 extensions to a community of over 15,000 members. SugarCRM today serves over 800 commercial customers.

24.And now, a success story in software…

No less an authority than the Wall Street Journal bestowed Sun Microsystems Inc. with a gold medal in its 2006 Technology Innovation Awards for DTrace trouble-shooting software. The panel of judges was made up of representatives from academic, industry and research institutions.

25.Linux for PlayStation? Cool!

The folks at the stoically-named Linux and Open Source Blog somehow managed to contain their enthusiasm with their recent announcement of Terra Soft Solutions’ launch of its Yellow Dog Linux operating system for the PlayStation 3 games console. This one’s already a success in the eyes of at least one: “We have worked closely with the energetic, determined E17 team to bring this advanced graphical user interface to a state of interface euphoria. … E17 is simply the most incredible thing I have ever used – with any operating system,” states Cesar Delgado of Terra Soft.

26.My sweet Portland home

Over at ZDNet, blogger Dana Blankenhorn compares the new wiki Portland with a milestone in pottery. Portland does have indeed have potential; the product is a series of interfaces for Linux GUIs GNOME and KDE. Also notable is that “Red Flag and Xandros are all going to ship Portland with their next releases.” Portland interface is promised to be “as easy to use as Windows or the Mac.”

27.The Summer of Code

The Summer of Code: Nice name, nicer game. Google, Apache, Samba, Nmap, Gaim and Internet2 participated in this educational program, which involved 400 students from 49 countries, by Google’s numbers. The project involved introducing students to open source projects with “real problems to solve” together with developers from the above-listed organizations and projects. Google alone reported contributing nearly $2 million to this effort via $4,500 grants.

28.Find God in open source

Open source, like the pantheistic version of the Supreme Being, is everywhere. Christian Origins has actually devoted more than one past on open source technology vis-à-vis its application to “Open Source Biblical Studies.” Interesting to note that, the “moderately successful TheoWiki project” mentioned in the entry became one year later a full-on well-stocked database of information on all things (and super beings) related to religion, running up 36,000 page views and ultimately merging with wikipedia itself.

29.Facilitating facilitators

CRMBlog recently reported the story of the implementation over at Learning.com, a developer of online technology integration and assessment tools for public schools. Within six months of installing NetSuite, Learning.com had achieved results in acceleration of its business processes by a crazy 1500 percent and ultimately doubled business in 2005. And best of all, Learning.com reportedly required no extra personnel or personnel costs in making the switch.

30.Help take the next giant leap

NASA wants to explore more space maybe even put that man on Mars that occasionally enters the fancy of space program fans. At the NASA website, you can help with such programs as building the Livingstone2 reusable artificial intelligence software system and NASA World Wind, “a graphically rich 3D virtual globe for use on desktop computers running Windows 2K or XP.” You, too, can participate in the next “giant leap for mankind.”

31.Platform makes no difference to success

Industry expert James Taylor now stands firmly with Gartner VP Mark Driver in believing that “you are not going to succeed or fail based on choice of platform in general.” Taylor’s entry on the subject were based on the analyst’s recent talk given at the Gartner Symposium and ITexpo. As for Taylor, he’s prescribed a cross-platform approach for some time.

32.Open source to your health

In the region of Extremadura, Spain, IBM recently built a $33.8 million open source-based computer network that connects over 14,000 doctors and medical professionals in the region. The system provides medical and patient information.

33.For Gibbs, it’s eyeOS

Says Mark Gibbs of Network World: “There are only a handful of web operating systems that are reasonably stable, few that approach mature, and even fewer that are open source. Fitting all these categories is eyeOS.” Well, all right, then.

34.The world halfway full

Tech News World reports that, according to a recent study by International Data Corporation, “More than half of all organizations worldwide have open source software in their production networks, and almost three-quarters of all software developers use open source in their work.” All those of you working hard to peddle open source may now take a bow; enjoy your success…now get back to work on that other fifty percent!

35.How to take advantage of a bad situation

Due to what one blogger over at Digital Divide called the “overzealousness of surveillance in the United States today,” a whole new call for technology and providers to block ISP spying has gone out. Metaproject GNU Telephony announced that Twinkle would be included its latest release of the GNU RTP Stack, GNU ccrtp 1.5. Twinkle is a free software framework for developing applications that use the secure RTP profile for VOIP. As for GNU, they’re proud to stay ahead of the government curve.

36.Makin’ movies

Would you believe open source made possible the films Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and V for Vendetta? There’s an interesting piece in UK-based The Business’ online edition. While you probably know that a great deal of special effects are created on computer, firms like The Moving Picture Company have been able to go from fly-by-night organization to a top post-production company London and back to one of many competitors, thanks in part to Linux and open source technology.

37.Funambol: Taking prizes…

Mobile open source company Funambol earned some success of a prize-winning sort recently, namely two first place Gold Star awards from Mobile Village readers for its consumer push email and PIM solutions. The company has also been recognized with the Silver Star award for its enterprise mobile email solution and a Bright Star award for CEO Fabrizio Capobianco’s leadership in consumer mobile software. Winners are chosen by subscribers to Go Mobile, MobileVillage’s free online newsletter sent to technology executives, mobile professionals, IT managers, developers, and tech journalists. Funambol also recently published figures showing a nice increase in downloads as well. Since its preview release earlier this year, the number of Funambol software downloads has more than doubled to 700,000.

38.…and writing a pretty good blog

Funambol’s prize-winning CEO Fabrizio Capobianco pretty faithfully writes a decent blog. Recently, Capobianco praised MySQL on its move to the Red Hat model, in fact, “an improvement on Red Hat, in my opinion.” Working well for Funambol, says Capobianco, is the Community Edition and Carrier Edition dual licensing plan, which he also wrote thoroughly on.

39.Zimbra bags four millionth

It’s four million and counting for Zimbra. Just last week, Zimbra hit the four million mark in paid mailboxes globally and more than 1,000 enterprises and organizations. Zimbra has noted the recent addition of partners as disparate as Digg.com and H&R Block. “Zimbra’s flexibility makes it a great partner. It enables service providers to deploy different tiers of services at different prices, depending on their customers’ needs,” said Jake Jacoby, president of Singlefin.

40.Singlefin’s great deal

And speaking of Singlefin, they’re giving it away! Singlefin announced at the beginning of last week that they would be providing e-mail filtering servicing to businesses free. The company’s hosted email filtering service provides anti-spam and anti-virus filtering. Singlefin supplies Juno, NetZero, and BlueLight with free e-mail filtering, and said that it would use the free services to detect new spam and virus outbreaks.

41.Really really fast and small

Silicon Graphics Incorporated is well known in the industry for its line of servers and supercomputers. The Altix 3000 was released in January 2003, running Intel Intanium 2 processor setups with Linux. Today, NASA’s Columbia supercomputer runs on Altix architecture. One Altix Linux system recently “spawned” the first-ever simulation of a functioning organism. Taking place under the auspices of Dr. Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a plant virus of one million or so moving atoms was simulated. The Altix system allowed calculations of atom movement in temporal units called femtoseconds, or one one-millionth of one-billionth – 0.000000000001– of a second. The project was the first successful case of biological reverse-engineering of a complete virus. Now that’s a supercomputer.

42.Really really big

Over at the “Linux and Me” blog, another record was reported for Altix and its Linux OS. At Munich, Germany’s Leibinz Rechen-Zentrum, Silicon Graphics showed off “the world’s largest computer to operate under a single copy of the Linux OS. On its SGI Altix 4700 blade platform and a beta version of Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Ver. 10, Silicon Graphics demonstrated a single system image running on a world-record 1,024 processors breaking a prior record of 512 processors, also held by SGI.”

43.Pentaho passes two milestones, gets one award

Open source business intelligence creator Pentaho recently passed two milestones with the passing of its second anniversary and now 1.5 million downloads. And SourceForge.net recently announced the naming Pentaho as project of the month.

44.NetCraft’s gold medal winner

The Daw Web Hosting Blog has an entry regarding the annual list of the top web-hosting companies as published by Netcraft. With providers ranked by reliability of network, this is something of an important announcement indeed. Top spot is held by Rackspace, a host that at least one other blogger reporting the list incredibly enthusiastic about the firm. Rackspace recently held their annual customer conference, with the results and presentations available here.

45.NetCraft’s silver medal winner

Taking second prize was DataPipe, a provider of managed hosting and security services whose most interesting and successful project recently has got to be the teamup with PBS.org to produce the online TV series “NerdTV”. Blogger Nivi, a long-time MIT hanger-on, has some nice stuff about the show, including one hilarious dialogue involving Bill Gates’ lack of taste.

46.NetCraft’s bronze medal winner

Number three in reliability was Oregon-based collocation and dedicated host Kattare. Since nothing says “success” like a customer rave, check out a posting at Blogging Roller by “Dave”.

47.…and honorable mention

NetCraft’s top ten was comprised of “There are three Italian companies among Top 50, one German, one Canadian, a few UK hosts, as well as the Chinese hosting company China Net Center.” Surely not to be alone in the top ten in its country for long, China Net Center currently dominates the great land in open-source security solutions. More can be found here.

48.They all ? open source

Who are they? Lots of different folks! An unnamed guy at codeblog gets off on gadgets, SAP’s Shai Agassi took time to respond to InfoWorld in his blog, saying same – really! J Bossian at JBoss proclaims undying amour and Abbas Halai does too, especially when “applied to non-software applications.” Ah, love is in the air!

49.Blaze Advisor dramatic success with Avent

Enterprise Decision Management – a Weblog – recently reported on Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor solution to $13 billion operation Avent and its recent problems with rules management. The results, as they say, have been dramatic. Said one company spokesman, “changes that took weeks can usually be done within days.” The network infrastructure at Avnet includes IBM Regatta servers running the AIX operating system; Oracle 9; and Java on IBM’s WebSphere application server.

50.The biggest success story of all And the bigger picture?

What about the success of open source itself? Steven Weber has some answers. Check out his “The Success of Open Source”, a 2004 prize-winner in the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award Competition. The book seeks to address the question, “How can open source survive economically, despite its overriding methodology of openness seemingly flying in the face of market wisdom?”

Tags: open source