Twenty-Five Years Upstream
7 hours ago
- Igalia is a worker-owned cooperative founded in 2001 by ten engineers with no investors or managers, where all employees become co-owners and decisions are made collectively.
- The company focuses on open source contributions across the entire software stack: browser engines (WebKit, Chromium, Servo), graphics drivers (Mesa, Vulkan for Raspberry Pi), the Linux kernel, GStreamer, and JavaScript engines (V8, JavaScriptCore, test262).
- Key projects include implementing CSS Grid in Blink and WebKit, creating WPE WebKit for embedded devices, maintaining the Orca screen reader, and leading the MathML and :has() selector implementations in browsers.
- Igalia actively participates in standard bodies like W3C, Khronos Group, ECMA TC39, and ARIA working group, often implementing features and then co-editing the specifications.
- The company pioneered an upstream-first consulting model: all code is contributed to open-source projects so it benefits everyone, and customers pay for features that land in mainstream releases.
- Notable recent initiatives include taking over Wolvic (from Firefox Reality), reviving the Servo engine, and launching Moonforge, an open-source framework for embedded OS builds.
- In 2024, Bocoup (another worker-owned cooperative) merged into Igalia, reflecting the company's growth from 10 to nearly 200 people across 25 years.