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5 Cool Corporate Open Source Contributors You Never Thought Of

I had the idea for this post after accidentally stumbling across KrakenJS and realising its a Paypal open source project.

OK so its pretty obvious companies like Google, RedHat, Oracle, etc all contribute to the open source community and even stand on its shoulders to a great extent. But after finding Paypal's contributions I did some digging to find some lesser known coroporate open source contributors. And some cool projects popped up.

There was a time when I'd do a lot of coding using Google API's and open source libraries but over the years I'd become dissillusioned with them and as a result subconciously steered clear of any future corporately sponsored projects.

# Quick KrakenJS intro before the main list

Not only is KrakenJS a much beefed up version of the Node framework ExpressJS with lads of extras including:

  • Application Security
  • NPM Proxy
  • Dust I18N
  • Dust Context

It's also a way to structure your project. It is like Sinatra's Padrino of the Ruby world.

# 1. Paypal

As I've already mentioned Paypal's greatest contribution (IMHO) KrakenJS here's Paypals GitHub page with all their projects:

# 2. Netflix

First it was a major banking organisation. Now we've the darling of media streaming services to the public and paraiah to US ISPs.

The Netflix open source contribution is no less impressive than PayPals - maybe even more so which is why its criminal its not more widely known. So here's a heads up on their:

Some of their notable projects:

  • Asgard - Web interface for application deployments and cloud management in Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Scumblr - cool custom search engine. Check the page for full info.
  • SimianArmy - Tools for keeping your cloud operating in top form.

# 3. Spotify

Some of their projects:

Check out the developer blog for all their API's and SDKs.

# 4. UK Government

What? That stuffy old wood and leather palace with its yays and nays? Yep - ineed they have such a prolific open source collection on Github (19 pages of repos!) It was hard to dig out the gems. Its worth checking them all and there's some that are criminally under-appreciated. Here's a few:

  • Magna Charter - Accessible, useful, beautiful barcharts from HTML tables.
  • Gov.UK Styleguides - Good to see the government have style guides in place.
  • Router - Just, erm. Wow. Check the readme - maybe you'll make more sense of it than me. Seems built on Go and handles routing for the main Gov.uk site.

One thing I have noticed is the UK Government does seem to like it's Ruby, esp. Ruby on Rails.

Check out the full 19 page monster list at AlphaGov.

# 5. The Guardian

The UK newspaper currently has a list of repos to rival the Government's but the potential for cool finds does seem a bit higher. Here's a few I managed to dig out:

Of course the Guardian wouldn't be much of a newspaper without its own developer blog now would it:

If you think I've missed off any great projects let me know: doug (at) tintophat (dot) com