Quick question: which is the largest open source company on Earth? That’s easy, right? It’s clearly Red Hat. After all, the company pulls in over $1 billion each year selling services around open-source software like Linux and JBoss.
But as I’ve argued before, such a distinction fits a very old-school understanding of open source business. Back in 2009, I suggested that Google was the world’s biggest open source company, given the copious quantities of code it contributes, not to mention its source code repository, inspiration of massive projects like Hadoop and other contributions. While some took exception to my classification of Google as an open source company, I still think it was accurate.
Except that Google is no longer the biggest open source company. Facebook is.