Six success stories
Fourteen were researched. Publishing all fourteen at equal weight produces a listicle, so these are the six that carry an argument made elsewhere on this site — including one that inverts nearly every assumption the rest of the site runs on, and one that is here because it is currently failing.
Linux — copyleft turned competitors into co-maintainers
What it proves: that a licence can restructure an industry's incentives. Under GPLv2 no vendor could privately fork the kernel and out-develop the commons, because improvements shipped to customers had to come back. Upstreaming stopped being generosity and became the cheaper option — which is the whole thesis of this site, achieved by legal design rather than persuasion.
The number: kernel 6.18 (30 November 2025) was built by 2,134 developers — the most in its history — including 333 first-time contributors across 13,710 commits. The largest corporate contributors were Intel at 10.4%, Google at 7.9%, Red Hat at 6.3%. No single party is close to controlling it, which is the survivability property visible as a statistic.
Let's Encrypt — and the mechanism was not price
What it proves: the most measurable civilisational impact in the list, and the reason it worked is the part most often mis-stated. Certificates had been cheap before. Free was necessary; automated was sufficient. What Let's Encrypt removed was not the cost — it was the transaction: the purchase, the paperwork, the annual renewal somebody had to remember, the outage when they did not.
The numbers: HTTPS page loads went from under 30% globally in 2015 to roughly 80% globally and around 95% in the US. Issuance went from one million certificates in March 2016 to around ten million per day by September 2025.
SQLite — the case that inverts almost everything
What it proves: that almost every rule on this site has a successful exception, and intellectual honesty requires publishing it.
- It is public domain, not open-source-licensed. There is no licence to reason about.
- It is explicitly not open-contribution — it refuses patches from anyone who has not signed a public-domain dedication affidavit. "Given enough eyeballs" is not merely unused here; it is structurally declined.
- The original affidavits are kept in a firesafe.
The number: an estimated one trillion databases in active use — plausibly the second most-deployed software library in the world after zlib.
By the standards of most open-source advocacy, SQLite does everything wrong: closed contribution, centralised control, no community governance. It is also one of the most successful and most trusted pieces of software ever written, and its reliability comes from an extraordinarily rigorous test suite maintained by a tiny team — not from openness to contribution. The lesson this site takes: the mechanism that produces quality is being paid to care, and the licence is not the mechanism.
PostgreSQL — the control case for the whole relicensing wave
What it proves: the survivability argument, demonstrated rather than asserted. No company owns PostgreSQL, so no company could relicense it. It went through the entire 2018–2024 wave untouched — not because its licence is stronger than MongoDB's or Redis's was, but because there is no party with standing to move it.
The number: 55.6% of developers use it — the most-used database in the Stack Overflow 2025 survey (n=49,063).
It is the single cleanest piece of evidence on this site: the projects that could be relicensed were relicensed, and the one that structurally could not be, was not. That is the argument, and PostgreSQL is the experiment.
cURL — here because it is currently failing
What it proves: that open source is not free and somebody is always paying, as a measured fact with a date and a casualty.
~30 billion installations. One project lead since 1998. Seven volunteers on the security team. And a bug bounty programme shut down on 31 January 2026 because the cost of processing AI-generated submissions exceeded what the programme was worth.
It is the most important open-source story of 2025–26 and it belongs to this site more than any other, so it has its own page. Read it →
Blender — a community that bought its own freedom
What it proves: the one case where the romantic version of the story is simply, literally true — and it should be published for exactly that reason, because a site that only publishes corrections is doing something other than history.
In 2002, with the company behind it bankrupt, the community raised €100,000 in seven weeks (July–September) to buy the source code and release it. They bought their own software's freedom, in cash.
The number that closes it: Flow (2024), made entirely in Blender, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Note what is not being claimed. This is not evidence that crowdfunding solves open-source sustainability — it is one rescue, once, of a tool with an unusually devoted user base, twenty-four years ago. It is evidence that the ceiling is higher than the cynical account allows, which is a different and more modest claim.
Two more, because they complicate the picture
Kubernetes — commoditising the layer below your business
Google released the orchestration layer and gave it to a foundation. The strategic logic is exact: commoditise the layer beneath the thing you sell, so that the layer beneath stops being a place a competitor can build a moat, and the workloads flow upward to where you compete. It is the clearest strategic use of open source in the industry's history, it worked, and it is a direct illustration of the technology-is-not-the-moat argument — executed by a company with the resources to be right about it.
VS Code — open core, executed so well it is invisible
An MIT-licensed core, a proprietary shipped binary, and a marketplace whose terms restrict use to that binary. A textbook open-core structure, executed so smoothly that most of its very large user base does not know it is running proprietary software.
That is the strongest available case both for and against open core, which is why it is here rather than on the open core page as a settled example. For: an enormous amount of genuinely valuable software got built and given away. Against: the boundary is invisible to the people standing on the wrong side of it, and invisibility is precisely what makes a boundary easy to move.
And the failure that belongs here
A history of open source with no failures in it is marketing. OpenSolaris is on this site, in the survivability section, where it does the most work: open-sourced under a licence deliberately chosen to be GPL-incompatible, under governance Sun retained, then killed by Oracle after the acquisition. The licence was not the problem; the copyright holder was. illumos survives as the fork — which is also the point, because a named party existed.