When you outstrip the capabilities of the standard software, you just press a button and keep going with the open source version.

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Unlike early pioneers SAS and SPSS (now owned by IBM), Revolution Analytics fits the mold of other key new players in the big data world: it supports and sells the commercial version of an open-source product, built and nurtured over many years by a dedicated community of enthusiasts.

FORBES: Revolution in the Big Data and Business Landscape

This has been a boon to two small browser-makers, Opera, a Norwegian software company, and Mozilla, which developed the Firefox browser based on an open-source version of Netscape.

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New features on the newest version should continue the momentum for this open source software upstart.

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Zero coincidentally, that same day EMC released an open source version of its data warehousing software, hoping to attract the kind of developers who might otherwise work on R.

FORBES: EMC: Our Analysis to Undercut IBM and Oracle

Apple obviously writes its own software for the iPhone, but Samsung's phones all run a customized version of Google's open-source Android, and Samsung is so dominant that it could very well split off and start building its own version of Android, just as Amazon did with the Kindle Fire.

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