

Ask HN: Commercial projects that ended up being open sourced - execat

I am looking at Brevidy (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iwasrobbed&#x2F;Brevidy) and it looks like a really nice place to read good code.<p>&quot;Brevidy was a video social network that I built with Ruby on Rails 3.0.7, HAML, Bootstrap, and jQuery that was released into beta testing February 2012. Brevidy closed down shortly after due to the high costs of server hosting in addition to all of the add-on services such as video transcoding, email, error exception handling, database storage, etc. Unfortunately, it&#x27;s very difficult to get investor interest without knowing a friend of a friend, so I wasn&#x27;t able to afford the rising costs that accompanied the user growth.&quot;<p>Are there other commercial projects like Brevidy that ended up being released under a FOSS license that you know of? I am primarily looking at Rails apps, but projects from all platforms are welcome.<p>My intent is to create a list of such apps.
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davissorenson
Well if you're looking for any kind of project, some famous ones are:

* Netscape a.k.a. Firefox

* Blender ([http://blender.org](http://blender.org)) was commercial until 2002 when the company behind it failed. The rights to the code were bought for €100,000 of user donations.

* Lightworks, a video editing program, is apparently supposed to become open source, right now it could be described as "freemium".

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Gepser
I love Blender, you stole my comment.

