Commercial vendor releases open source product

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Posted by dr.bejay, 05-19-2008, 11:52 AM
Today the email software company AtMail is releasing an open source version of it's web mail client. This will be based on it's commercial offering and will include an easy upgrade path. I see this as a good opportunity for startups that are looking towards future growth and are wanting to plan ahead as well as for smaller sites and companies that don't require the full on support from a commercial package. From their company blog:

We are proud to announce the availability of AtMail Open! An Open-source AtMail edition based on the Apache 2.0 license, which is provided as a lightweight Ajax Webmail client with a focus on usability and simplicity.

The commercial version of AtMail will be further maintained and supported, and includes all the enhanced features such as Groupware, Calendaring, Advanced interface for IE/Firefox, POP3/maildir support, Mail-server edition, Webadmin, Outlook Synchronization and more. For more details view the comparison chart for the open-source edition and the commercial version.

We have released the open source edition of AtMail to further promote the usage of AtMail, offer users looking for “more” an upgrade path to the commercial AtMail version, and provide the open-source community a fresh look at Ajax Webmail.

I'm very interested to see where this takes them as a company and how this is received by the open source community.