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"Zeke" was generally happy with the professional Web authoring application he used, but he didn't like the way some of the buttons looked when he added "click here" links on a page. So he grabbed a few development tools, created some shiny new buttons of his own and published them free of charge for anyone who wanted to use or improve them.

It might sound like another open-source community feel good story, but the application in question is Dreamweaver, the leading professional Web authoring package and one of the main products from Macromedia, a 100 percent proprietary software publisher.

But Macromedia also is one of a shrinking number of software makers that support user exchanges, in which customers can swap free or shareware software add-ons they've created using freely available development tools. While many software publishers have abandoned such forums for a variety of legal and business concerns, Macromedia, Adobe Systems and a few others have persisted, creating an interesting middle ground between closed, proprietary development models and collaborative open-source methods.

"I think the exchange allows us to harness some of the good things you see in the open-source movement," said Jeff Whatcott, vice president of product management for Macromedia. "The whole idea is to harness the community to add value to our product, and that's good for everybody. It makes the products more useful, and that certainly serves our business objectives in the long term. And it gives our customers an easy way to customize these environments they live in all day."

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Source: c|net