Twenty-Five Years Upstream

In September 2001, ten engineers from the University of A Coruña started a company. They had no outside investors, no managers, and no intention of ever appointing any. What they had was a conviction that you could build a serious engineering business entirely in the open; that the code written for a customer and the code given away could be the same code, and that the company doing it could be owned by the people doing the work.

Twenty-five years later, we are closing in on 200 people spread across the world, and that is still how Igalia works.

No managers, no shareholders

The unusual thing about Igalia has never been the code. It is that everyone here is expected to become an owner.

There is no executive layer, because we never built one. New colleagues join with the expectation of advancing to become partners, co-owners with a vote. The decisions that a board would normally make are made collectively instead: what we work on, who we hire, what we charge, what we do with the money. Part of the answer to that last one has been the same for well over a decade: a share of what we earn goes to non-profit organisations, every year.

Owning the company means choosing our own commitments, and we have tended to keep them for a long time. Much of what follows is the result.

From Fisterra to WebKit

With local roots in Galicia, Spain, but with a global vision, Igalia focused on open innovation and Free and Open Source Software.

We became part of the GNOME ecosystem in 2002 and built Fisterra, an open source ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) on top of GNOME technologies, which is still the software most likely to surprise people who only know us for our browser work. Galicia named us its most innovative company in 2003. In 2006, in collaboration with Caixanova and Rey Juan Carlos University, we brought the Master of Free Software to Galicia, and in 2007 we joined the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board.

The turn came through mobile. Our work on Maemo from 2005, and later Moblin, MeeGo, and Tizen, put us next to the problem of getting the web to render well on hardware that had no business rendering anything. In 2008, browsers became our centre of gravity. Core developers of WebKit’s GTK+ port were part of our team, and we helped carry Epiphany off Gecko and onto WebKit, a change announced that year and shipped with GNOME 2.28 the following one. It is one of the most important milestones in our history, and the shape of the Igalia people recognise today was set by it.

The decade of the open web and beyond

Contributing code to a browser engine teaches you quickly that the code is downstream of an argument you were not in the room for. So we joined the rooms. The W3C in 2013, the Khronos Group in 2016, ECMA International and TC39 in 2018. Igalians have served as co-chairs at the W3C’s ARIA working group and TC39 itself.

The clearest illustration of why that mattered is CSS Grid. We implemented it in both Blink and WebKit, and it shipped in stable Chrome and Safari in 2017. It was the first genuinely new layout system the web had received in years, and arguably the first robust layout system the web ever had. Two years later, one of us became a co-editor of the specification. Implement it, then help write the standard for it: that sequence describes a lot of what we have done since.

The same decade produced the other half of our work. In 2015 we started working on a lightweight WebKit port built on Wayland, which grew into WPE WebKit: the official WebKit port for embedded platforms. The first official release came to fruit in 2018. WPE WebKit now runs the web on a large and mostly invisible population of devices.

Every year since 2009, we have hosted a hackfest in A Coruña that began as the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest and, from 2014, opened to every engine as the Web Engines Hackfest. This past June, 150 browser developers spent three days at the Palexco conference centre in A Coruña. During the rest of that same week, Igalians from all over the world gathered. It is our favourite week of the year.

Igalia is much more than the open web. We became a leading contributor to Mesa in 2014 and have stayed among the top handful ever since, and we brought open source Vulkan drivers to the Raspberry Pi.

The whole stack, and the specifications that describe it

What has changed most in the last five years is reach. We work now at every layer between the hardware and the specification.

In 2025 that meant:

• 362 commits to the Linux kernel across six releases, including an energy-aware CPU scheduler and fair scheduling for GPUs
• Driver work in Mesa for Qualcomm Adreno and Raspberry Pi graphics
• Wayland and AMD display colour management
• The second-largest share of GStreamer contributions
• Compilers and virtual machines from V8 and JavaScriptCore to LLVM and FEX

In the browser engines, we were the top contributor to WebKit after Apple, wrote just under a fifth of all the commits Chromium received from outside Google, and wrote more than a quarter of all commits to the Servo engine.

We maintain Orca, the screen reader the Linux desktop depends on, where we write about four-fifths of the code. And we were the largest contributor to test262, the test suite that decides what counts as a correct JavaScript engine.

That last one is the part we would ask you to notice. There are companies that write specifications and companies that implement them. We do both, and we do them in the same room. MathML was absent from Chromium for years until we specified, prototyped and shipped it. The :has() selector had been stalled since 1998 before it shipped in 2022. Temporal, the replacement for JavaScript’s Date, has been driven by our people in TC39 and our people in the engines. For Vulkan we write the drivers, and we are the main contributors to the Khronos Conformance Test Suite that judges them, the tests that ensure consistent behaviour across different hardware and software platforms.

None of this is charity. Igalia is a consultancy, and most of the work above was paid for by someone with a product to ship: a device maker who needs the web to run well on their hardware, a platform that needs a feature its users keep asking for, a company whose roadmap depends on something deep in the stack working better than it does today. What they get from us is not a patch to carry forever. We do the work upstream, in the project itself, so it arrives in the next release and keeps working long after the contract ends. Our customers ship products built on code that nobody has to maintain alone, and everyone else gets the same code. That has been the arrangement from the start.

Picking things up, and building our own

Some of our work has been inheritance. When Mozilla stepped back from Firefox Reality in 2022, we took it on and made it Wolvic. When Servo went quiet, we joined its technical steering committee in 2023 and brought it back, and the Sovereign Tech Fund is now backing our work on its accessibility and embedding APIs. Projects that matter should not disappear because the company that started them changed its priorities.

And in March we published something new of our own. Moonforge is an open source framework built on Yocto and OpenEmbedded for building embedded operating systems. It provides curated layers, reproducible builds, over-the-air updates, and CVE reports and SBOMs generated as a matter of course. It is twenty-five years of accumulated stack knowledge assembled into something other people can build on, and it stands alongside WPE WebKit as software that is ours to build and ours to look after.

Growing by joining

In August, the workers of Bocoup joined us. Two worker-owned cooperatives, both of them long-standing contributors to the web platform, decided that the sensible thing was to be one. After twenty-five years of growing mostly one person at a time, it means a great deal to us that Igalia has become a place another cooperative wanted to be part of.

Twenty-five years on

Twenty-five years ago, ten people decided to find out whether a company owned by its workers could do serious engineering entirely in the open. We think the answer is in the commit logs. Everything above is upstream, available to everyone, which is the only version of this that was ever worth twenty-five years.

The ten have become closer to two hundred, the code has gone from an ERP in Galicia to the browser engines, kernels and graphics drivers that most of the industry runs on, and the arrangement has not changed: no managers, no shareholders, and everything we build left where anyone can use it.

Here is to the next twenty-five.