Linux kernel development scaled through public mailing lists and a distributed maintainer network that routes patches through trusted subsystem experts rather than a single central engineering hierarchy.
WebKit began inside Apple from KHTML and KJS, then became a public engine with contributors and ports across companies and platforms, separating browser infrastructure from one vendor's product.
Ubuntu paired a global contributor community with Canonical's funding, staffing, release engineering, and retained authority, creating a durable but deliberately asymmetric community-company governance model.
Software Freedom Conservancy gave community-run free-software projects shared nonprofit, financial, legal, trademark, contract, and license-compliance infrastructure without requiring each project to build its own institution.
Apache grew from developers sharing patches to an abandoned NCSA web server into a foundation model built around public mailing lists, project committees, community continuity and vendor-neutral stewardship.
Debian turned a Linux distribution into a constitutional community, publishing a Social Contract, Free Software Guidelines and formal governance rules for a project maintained by contributors rather than one company.