Hacker News Reader

Hmm it doesn't really count but JBoss is open source and has paid developers. jQuery UI is maintained by a consulting group. Firefox's core developers are paid. I'm pretty sure there are paid contributors on Hadoop and Lucene.

And lets not forget Rails....

View on HN

Perhaps less well known are open-source reporting companies like Actuate (sponsors/main developers of the top-level Eclipse BIRT project), Pentaho, JasperSoft. Not sure about revenue models for others, but Actuate sells support for their open-source tools and offers proprietary add-ons for those that need to scale their deployments.

37 signals doesn't get paid specifically for rails though. If 37 signals went away, rails wouldn't. Not without a huge fuss anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com