World’s Biggest Open-Source Company? Google

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Article Source The Open Road
September 16, 2009, 7:45 am

 

Red Hat is generally credited as the industry’s leading open-source company, but it’s a distinction that is as meaningless as it is incorrect. While Red Hat’s revenue directly derives from the open-source software it develops and distributes, other companies like Sun, IBM, and Google actually write and contribute far more open-source code. It may be time to stop talking about open-source companies and get back to the importance of open-source code.

Open source is increasingly the foundation upon which software and Web companies depend. MySpace made waves on Tuesday by open sourcing Qizmt, a distributed computation framework (running on Windows Server, intriguingly) that currently powers MySpace’s “People you may know” feature. But MySpace, as VentureBeat notes, was simply playing catch-up to Facebook’s recent open sourcing of Tornado…

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