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Twenty-Five Years Upstream

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Ten engineers from A Coruña founded a worker-owned company in 2001 with no investors or managers and a rule that everyone should become an owner. That cooperative governance underpins a business model of doing paid consultancy work directly upstream in open source: customers fund features and fixes that are contributed into the projects themselves, and a portion of earnings supports non-profits. Early work included GNOME contributions and an ERP called Fisterra; mobile-platform involvement (Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, Tizen) pushed the company into browser engines, leading to major work on WebKit’s GTK+ port and Epiphany’s migration in 2008 and to an annual Web Engines Hackfest that gathers hundreds of contributors.

Technical reach now spans hardware to specifications. In 2025 alone there were 362 Linux-kernel commits (including an energy-aware CPU scheduler and fair GPU scheduling), Mesa driver work for Adreno and Raspberry Pi, Wayland and AMD display color management, major GStreamer activity, and contributions across V8, JavaScriptCore, LLVM and FEX. The company is the top WebKit contributor after Apple, wrote ~20% of external Chromium commits and >25% of Servo commits, maintains Orca (~80% of its code) and led work on test262. That hands-on implementation plus standards participation produced features like CSS Grid, :has(), MathML restoration and Temporal. Projects rescued or created include Wolvic, revived Servo, WPE WebKit and Moonforge (an embedded OS framework). The example demonstrates that an upstream-first, worker-owned consultancy can deliver durable, widely used infrastructure across browsers, kernels and graphics stacks.

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