There is a lot of money being made in Open Source, although the profitable companies are not always the ones you would expect.

While many companies don’t disclose detailed financial information we have dug around to find numbers for some well-known open source companies and projects to see how they are doing financially. Royal Pingdom has collected the financial information of some of the most popular open source companies.

One of the great examples is Mozilla which has the famous Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client. In 2006 the Mozilla Corporation generated $66.8 million in revenue with 85% of the revenue coming from Google for being the default search engine and ads placed on search result pages. Google and Mozilla recently extended the deal to 2011 (just before Google launched Chrome, ironically).

You can have look at other popular open source companies like Canonical, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Yahoo and Nokia.

Source: This is the money being made TODAY in Open Source