Industry and organizations

Main article: Software industry
Software has its own niche industry that is called the software industry made up of different entities and peoples that produce software, and as a result there are many software companies and programmers in the world. Because software is increasingly used in many different areas like in finance, searching, mathematics, space exploration, gaming and mining and such, software companies and people usually specialize in certain areas. For instance, Electronic Arts primarily creates video games.

Also selling software can be quite a profitable industry. For instance, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft is the second richest man in the world in 2008 largely by selling the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office software programs. The same goes for Larry Ellison, largely through his Oracle database software.

There are also many non-profit software organizations like the Free Software Foundation, GNU Project, Mozilla Foundation. Also there are many software standard organizations like the W3C, IETF and others that try to come up with a software standard so that many software can work and interoperate with each other like through standards such as XML, HTML, HTTP or FTP.

Some of the well known software companies include Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Novell, SAP and HP.