Commercial open-source applications
Open source software is widely used for private and non-commercial applications. Since the early days of Linux, however, many commercial organizations have used open source frameworks, modules, and libraries inside their for-profit products.
While this may seem to fly in the face of the GNU and other open source licenses that stipulate that no derived works shall be sold commercially, a number of legal and technical mechanisms have been used to insulate the commercial products from the open source stipulations. Two of the more common tactics for this are:
- Using a dual-license model, where a code base is published under a traditional open source license and under a commercial license simultaneously, and
- Using functional encapsulation, where an open source framework or library is installed on a user's computer separately from the commercial product, and the commercial product uses the open source functionality in an "arm's length" way (under the argument that the commercial product was shipped without the open source library).
The purpose of this list is to provide information to users of products that incorporate or depend upon open source projects. As this may involve hundreds of companies, editing and expanding this list is a community effort.
<rd>Current Version| Product or Service Name | Vendor | Description | First introduced | Open Source Project Name | |
| Funambol Enterprise Server | Funambol | Mobile email and PIM synchronization | 5.0 | 1994 | Funambol Project |