The PuffinPLC Project is a community effort. The individual developers own the copyrights for their pieces of code but collectively license the project to everyone. By pooling our resources in this way, we hope the overall benefit will outweigh our efforts. We have major developers on at least three continents--North America, Europe and Australia--aiming for a truly world-class solution in industrial control.
The project is currently hosted at Control.com, Inc. While that gives Control.com a certain amount of privilege and responsibility, the company has no more voice in the project than any other developer contributing comparable resources.
In fact, the project is written under a GNU license, which means that anyone is welcome to take part in the project, study it, change it and publish changes or extensions, as long as they're happy to let others do the same.
What's in it for us and Control.com? Apart from getting a PLC package we can really call our own, really understand and use with the kind of confidence that comes with full understanding, we will be doing our part as loyal minions in Linus' quest for world domination.