Open Source – The Secret Sauce in Successful Web Companies

Netflix unveiled their most recent contribution to the open source community on Tuesday with Eureka, “a REST based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers.”. Eureka joins eleven other projects on the Netflix GitHub repository. While not extremely exciting in and of itself, Eureka led me to wonder what other companies are sharing to the community.
What I found is that just about every major company doing business on the web is releasing at least some code as open source. Some organizations are releasing major portions of their infrastructure, while the more secretive release only small portions.

Apple – Portions of OS X, iOS, and the developer tool kits are available, but you are not going to be able to build an open source version of the operating systems. Apple releases a handful of tools and libraries with each point release to comply with licensing terms. However, Apple’s involvement in the WebKit Open Source Project is well known, and highly valuble.

Microsoft – I did not expect to see so much code available from Microsoft, the once sworn enemy of the open source community. To be

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