Well if you're looking for any kind of project, some famous ones are:
* Netscape a.k.a. Firefox
* Blender (http://blender.org) was commercial until 2002 when the company behind it failed. The rights to the code were bought for €100,000 of user donations.
* Lightworks, a video editing program, is apparently supposed to become open source, right now it could be described as "freemium".