The 8 Most Successful Open Source Products Ever

Why it is a success: Mozilla’s crowning achievement so far, the Firefox web browser has become a mega success. Firefox 1.0 was launched in 2004 and the browser has since then taken away a huge chunk of the browser market from the previously dominant Internet Explorer, and is arguably the reason that Microsoft started to put more effort into updating IE with new versions. Although Firefox is still number two overall, it has become the dominant browser among the more "techie" crowd (this blog, for example, gets 59% of its visits from Firefox and just 18% from IE).

Why it is a success: Launched in 2004, Ubuntu is by far the most popular Linux distribution today, especially on the desktop side. Considering the massive success of Ubuntu in recent years, we thought it was worth its own mention here even though we already mentioned Linux.

Why it is a success: MySQL is the most widely used database server in the world, used by a huge amount of websites and services (examples include Wikipedia, Facebook and, more modestly, our very own Pingdom.com…). It’s the M in the hugely popular LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

Why it is a success: Since its launch in 2004 as a fork of the b2 blog software, WordPress has become a dominant and hugely popular blog platform. In a survey we made back in January, 27% of the top 100 blogs ran on WordPress. If you also counted WordPress.com, Automattic’s hosted WordPress service, that number rose to 32%, more than any other blog software. Since then there have also been some changes, such as the nine Wired blogs in the top 100 switching from Typepad to WordPress.com, so that percentage is likely significantly higher now (all else unchanged, it would be 41%).

Why it is a success: FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD have been well-respected server OS alternatives for a long time. Derived from Berkeley Unix in the 1990s, we chose to put them into one group here. As an interesting aside, the core for Apple’s Mac OS X is derived from FreeBSD.