An open company is defined, for the purposes of this list, as a for-profit organization whose core practices are guided by principles of openness, transparency and interoperability. This philosophy can be summarized by the maxim:

Share as much as possible, charge as little as possible.

derived from the original formulation by Gittip (now Gratipay).

In practice, this often means:

• releasing its products as
  free and open source software,
  open content,
  or open source hardware
• using open standards
  and inter-operable formats
• developing its products openly, using public communication channels
• publishing as much financial and operational data as possible, without compromising customer privacy.
• etc.

The following pages provide a more detailed overview of this concept:

• Open business: Wikipedia article
• Open business: from the P2P Foundation wiki

• Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams: Wikinomics
• James M. Whitehurst: The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance

• Paul Graham: What business can learn from open source
• Massimo Menichinelli: Business models for open hardware
• Roger Clarke: Open source software and open content as models for eBusiness
• Chris Anderson: A business model for open source hardware
• The Economist: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual
• Chad Whitacre: The second open company
• Timothy Cook: Why open companies? A new culture of business
• Shereef Bishay: The open enterprise manifesto

• The Open Company Initiative directory (OCI):
  A group of companies which explicitly adopted OCI's openness pledge
  • (dormant)
• The Open 100: a competition held in 2009-2010 to find the top 100 open innovation companies
  • (defunct — these links are from the Web Archive)
• The VAR Guy's The Open Source 50 (2009 list, 2010 list, 2012 update)
  • (unmaintained)
• Awesome Open:
  A curated list of organizations, projects and initiatives that maintain open codebases and datasets