A community-curated list of awesome open companies, inspired by the many awesome-x lists out there.

(click here to jump straight to the list below.)

Contributions to this list are welcome! Just edit the README.md (this document) and send the changes as a pull request. Guidelines are available.

1. What is an open company?
2. Companies
3. Resources
4. Books
5. Articles
6. Videos
7. Similar lists
8. License

An open company is defined, for the purposes of this list, as a for-profit organization whose core practices are guided by principles of openness, transparency and interoperability. This philosophy can be summarized by the maxim:

Share as much as possible, charge as little as possible.

derived from the original formulation by Gittip (now Gratipay).

In practice, this often means:

• releasing its products as free and open source software, open content, or open source hardware
• using open standards and inter-operable formats
• developing its products openly, using public communication channels
• publishing as much financial and operational data as possible, without compromising customer privacy.
• etc.

The following pages provide a more detailed overview of this concept:

• Open business: Wikipedia article
• Open business: from the P2P Foundation wiki

(in alphabetical order, with optional announcement blog posts)

Company	Openness Pledge	Open Product	Open Standards	Statement	Open Channel	Open Finance
Aleph Objects	link	N/A
Arduino LLC	Arduino - Introduction	Arduino
Atlassian	Company values | Atlassian	N/A
Balsamiq	Company | Balsamiq	N/A
Bevry	Bevry	DocPad
Buffer	Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more	Misc		Why we have a core value of transparency at our startup		Revenue
CodeCombat	CodeCombat - Learn how to code by playing a game	CodeCombat		Why you should open-source your startup
Couchbase	Open Source Projects	All Products
Dangerous Prototypes	About - DP	Projects
Dreamwidth	About Dreamwidth Studios	Dreamwidth
GitLab	About Us | GitLab	GitLab
Gratipay	Welcome to Gratipay	All Products		The first open company		Finance
Growstuff	(archive) Values - Growstuff Wiki	Growstuff		Why Growstuff is open source
MapBox	Open Source - MapBox	Misc
Neocities	(archive) Neocities - stats	Neocities.org		The first Neocities Open Company report
The Open Company	The Open Company	N/A
OpenCraft	OpenCraft | Open edX Development & Hosting Services	N/A
Red Hat	Red Hat Jobs - Our culture	Mics
Sentry	About Sentry	Sentry		Driven by Open Source
Tessel	Open Source - Tessel	Tessel
Transloadit	Open Source	Uppy	tus	Jobs & Culture

• Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams: Wikinomics

• Paul Graham: What business can learn from open source
• Massimo Menichinelli: Business models for open hardware
• Roger Clarke: Open source software and open content as models for eBusiness
• Chris Anderson: A business model for open source hardware
• The Economist: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual
• Chad Whitacre: The second open company
• Timothy Cook: Why open companies? A new culture of business
• Shereef Bishay: The open enterprise manifesto

• BetterMeans introduction

• The Open Company Initiative directory (OCI): A group of companies which adopted the OCI pledge
  • (can't be updated by the community, only by the companies themselves)
• The Open 100: a competition held in 2009-2010 to find the top 100 open innovation companies
  • (defunct — these links are from the Web Archive)
• The VAR Guy's The Open Source 50 (2009 list, 2010 list, 2012 update)
  • (unmaintained)
• Awesome Open: A curated list of organizations, projects and initiatives that maintain open codebases and datasets

This work and all contributions to it are released into the public domain under the terms of the CC0 1.0.