"SkinnyCorp.com has built a group of community-based sites on a traditional LAMP stack--Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. SkinnyCorp software engineer Harper Reed credits the open source infrastructure with keeping the business agile. He says the licensing costs of proprietary software would have strangled a business that's growing as quickly as his.
"SkinnyCorp owns a collection of blog and ecommerce sites. The founders, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, met in 2000 on a graphic design forum. After Jake won a T-shirt design contest, they decided it would be fun to start a business selling community-designed T-shirts. They called it threadless.com. Participants get to submit T-shirt designs, which are judged by the threadless.com community. The winning designs go up for sale on the site, and the designer gets a cash prize..."
