Just read a great article about how JBoss grew from being a small software company into a market leader. Here are 2 quotes from the article:
JBoss was an Open Source company providing free middleware software to it’s customers. By the end of 2003, JBoss had been downloaded 5 million times, and the company was doing about $1m a year in revenues, selling training, documentation and consulting.
JBoss were extremely successful in building their sales and marketing machine, and went on to reach an annualized bookings run rate of about $65 million a year within two and a half years after starting the process. At that time they were acquired by Red Hat for $350 million plus an earnout of $70 million.
Read the full article at http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-marketing-machine/jboss-example/