The company, which although not an open source advocate, is basing its commercial model along the lines of similar companies such as SendMail Inc and
Scriptics Inc, intends to start with home and individual users and move up through small businesses to ISPs and corporates It says that if Rebol takes off, it could start to be passed around the network in place of binary of HTML data.
Other companies, such as Ousterhout's
Scriptics, Allman's Sendmail, Inc., and Hardt's ActiveState Tool Corp., are taking a hybrid approach, providing both a rich open-source product base and proprietary value-added extensions.
For example, the Linux operating system is supported by several companies including Red Hat and Caldera; the GNU tools are supported by Cygnus; the Sendmail email delivery system is supported by Sendmail, Inc.; and the Tcl scripting language is supported by my company, Scriptics. This association between open-source software and business is not just a historical artifact, but a necessity.
For example, Scriptics provides tools for the Tcl scripting language and Cygnus has recently begun selling additional development tools for use in conjunction with gcc.
For example, Sendmail, Inc., will sell an extended version of the Sendmail package that includes better management tools, and Scriptics will sell Tcl extensions that are needed in specific commercial applications such as automated testing and finance.
In 1998 1 left Sun to form Scriptics, which sells Tcl development tools, services, and platform extensions while continuing to develop the open-source Tcl core.
My experience at Sun and Scriptics is that open source and commercial developments are symbiotic.