[jraph]

It's not always pure marketing. There are companies who truly have open source / free software in their DNA. The founders are true open source proponents, and some people joined these companies because of the open source aspect. Because of this, sometimes, a majority of the people in these companies are pro-open source and will skew things towards this. Some don't even have investors pushing against this.

What do you think about WordPress, XWiki, Nextcloud, Passbolt, Univention, LinPhone, Element, Igalia for instance?

I don't know the internals of each of these, but I believe they all manage to make money from open source by keeping the free software / open source spirit.

[usrusr]

People, founders or not, are of little consequence when they are not owners, and majority at that. Which companies of that list are bootstrapped, and which have taken outside investment? I would only consider the bootstrapped ones valid entries, all others just haven't left the pretend stage yet.

If you already did base your list on bootstrappedness, consider this post strong agreement: because that's what I'm trying to say. Yes, there are companies that can be considered "true to the idea of open source" (sqlite! Even though technically neither a company nor open source), but there's a clear cutoff.

[jraph]

> I would only consider the bootstrapped ones valid entries, all others just haven't left the pretend stage yet.

I agree with this, though excluding companies burning investors money is already raising the bar higher than for closed source ones. Most companies are not bootstrapped and never leave the pretend zone. Of course not a fan.

XWiki and Nextcloud [1] are definitely bootstrapped. Element is definitely not.

Automattic (behind WordPress) has raised funds, also bought back private stock [3], not clear what it means. They also seem to make money from closed source software.

I would expect any of these company, except maybe Element, to actually make money from their open source activity.

When I'm making those lists, I also don't consider open core and/or obviously VC-founded companies, like Mattermost and GitLab.

Side question, in which ways SQLite is not open source for you? It seems pretty much open source, I'm fine with open source software not accepting outside contributions. They still guarantee the important user freedoms of free software.

[1] https://nextcloud.com/about/

[2] https://www.igalia.com/about/history

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic

> Fully employee-funded and pursuing an organic-growth strategy, Nextcloud already turned profitable by the end of 2016

[usrusr]

You are right, sqlite is public domain and I fell victim to some echoes in my mind from the early days of the open source licencing theorizing when "pubic domain is not" was an important talking point, but I guess the thing public domain was not is compyleft (or one of its mostly overlapping siblings), not open source, the superset of everything not closed.