Not mutually exclusive? The fact that money is being paid for some closed source product does at least prove there is an actual demand for whatever they figured out to do, and how. So either a marginal improvement, or simply open sourcing a subset of an existing product, or making something completely new, or better... all good isn't it?

Maybe reimplementing something that already exists a couple times over leads to good things as well. I can imagine some subtle insights could be gained which matter to some of the user base.