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I think maybe the most interesting open source companies today are Couchbase and Mongo.

AFAICT, everything Couchbase does is Apache Licensed. An old-school traditionalist could look at them and conclude that they have no proprietary IP at all.

Mongo has perhaps a little more of a boundary because they use the AGPL (which will scare away more enterprise customers than the Apache license will). But still.

AFAIK, both of these firms are paying the significant costs of developing their own software. Neither of them can be characterized as building their business model on low dev costs from the use of community-developed code.

These firms have more funding than many open source firms get from an exit. Both of them seem to have significant and fast-growing revenue. Both of them seem to be on track to a successful IPO with reasonable expectations for continued growth thereafter.

Even in today's open source world, what these two companies are apparently doing seems kind of amazing.