Over the last two decades of advising commercial open source (COSS) companies, I’ve seen the ecosystem mature from a handful of pioneers into a foundational pillar of the modern software industry.
When I wrote From Project to Profit, my goal was to provide founders with a handbook for navigating that journey.
But as the COSS model has exploded in popularity, I realized something was missing: a comprehensive map of the ecosystem itself. Investors, founders, and developers were all operating without a centralized source of truth.
Today, I am thrilled to announce that Chinstrap Community is changing that.
We are launching Cossmology — the definitive directory of the COSS universe. We have cataloged over 1,000 commercial open source companies, complete with structured data on their key people, core OSS projects, funding history, and the latest news headlines.
We’re also launching COSS Weekly — a free newsletter that delivers the most important COSS news, funding announcements, and new startups directly to your inbox every week. If you want to stay current on the companies and trends shaping the future of open source software, this is the easiest way to do it.
Explore the directory and subscribe to COSS Weekly at https://cossmology.com. We’ve also mirrored the data on GitHub: https://github.com/Chinstrap-Community/Awesome-OSS-Companies.
A huge thank you to my co-founder Sabir Ibrahim for architecting the platform that makes this possible.
