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→Komodo: Making Proprietary Products Open Source
*Increase commercial sales - Shane detailed on the fact that companies will support the product the open source product and purchase the retail edition for commercial backing (support) purposes.
With these great ideas comes challenges, and roadblocks. As Shane detailed and as I hinted above, software firms have two common problemproblems: '''''How does one expose a software product in a highly fragmented market stuffed with competition, when one has low financial backing?''''' and '''''Would open source, better our product?'''''
ActiveState resolved problem one by the fist issue with an attempted fix to resolve this issue by implementing strategic marketing, which fundamentally increased their user base but neglected to obtain a dominance in a niche area. This fixed the first problem but the second remained.
The solution was to open source the product alongside an extended feature retail release. As a result, their user base greatly increased; those unwilling to pay for a product now were able to use the product and contribute, and ActiveState could explore new business models.
* Would the free version collapse sales on other Komodo IDE products?
* Could they build a community from scratch and leverage that community, and if they built it would they actually come?
But, as a result of open sourcing, ActiveState witnessed first hand the essence and spirit of open source by the manifestation of a community of users willing to contribute patches, such as: language localization - a benefit that ActiveState did not anticipate not have any resources to support on their own.
Ultimately, through the success of Komodo Edit, downloads are growing, sales are slowly increasing and the community is expanding to new frontiers. An outlook to the future details continual growth of the Komodo user base and expansion of community.
== Comparison ==
== My Personal Views on Open Source ==