Hi, Emmanuel -
Thanks for your reply and questions. Polished Geek is primarily a web development and Joomla extension company. We do only a limited number of full website projects from beginning to end, so we don't make the bulk of our income off of standard web design projects. Our business model is built around custom development of web applications, Joomla extensions and technical consulting/troubleshooting. The majority of our clients are actually other web design and development companies who hire us to handle unusual or highly complex technical challenges within their client projects. We're often the secret solution behind the scenes that the end-clients never even know about.
The short answer to your questions is yes, we are certainly intending that if it makes sense financially, we will release our work as a commercial extension. We believe in open source GPL, and never encode our work. Over the last three years we've distributed both free community extensions and commercial extensions. Hopefully there will be enough interest for HikaShop extension development for us to add several to our lineup.
So that's the short answer. Now if you're interested, here's the long one.... 
Many times innovative solutions have the potential to become a commercial extension, and we certainly look for those opportunities. As much as possible we try to solve our clients problems with something that is built in a way that can be applicable for additional clients. Then, IF there is enough of a potential market to justify "productizing" the code by investing in product marketing, writing full admin documentation, performing QA testing on multiple Joomla and ecommerce versions, and training our staff to support it, etc., then yes, we will release it to the market, usually as a commercial extension. All of our commercial extensions are released under the GPL license, fully open source, with all the freedom that GPL includes to use the code unlimited times for multiple clients if you wish.
Sometimes we'll hear comments from those who make a living from website design, rather than extensions, that go something like this: "You already built it, you have the code done, so why are you charging $XX for it? That's just extra money now. You should either give it away free or charge a really low price." I know it can seem that way to non-extension vendors, but the math isn't quite that simple. There are significant operating and support costs associated with distributing an extension. Even a free one isn't free to support - time is money, and time staff spends supporting a free or low cost extension is time they can't work on another paid project. So what can appear to be a simple plugin can still have significant ongoing costs for testing and support, not to mention the need to develop, test and document upgrades as Joomla and the ecommerce software update over time. This is even more so the case if an extension has frontend functionality rather than just admin configuration. Frontend extensions can involve all kinds of potential testing and support issues for template compatibility, JavaScript or AJAX conflicts, conflicts with other 3rd party extensions on the same webpage(s), cross-browser compatibility, the list goes on and on. This is always a lot more work than what's involved to get a single client's solution tested and deployed on their site.
Of course, there aren't just more costs. On the plus side, releasing extensions helps bring in future clients. We get requests daily from prospective clients who say "I see you built X, so I bet you can build Y for me!" And 99% of the time, why yes we can. Extensions do drive additional custom work and website traffic. They help get your brand out there and your name known. There is a positive effect on business beyond the additional income derived from the extension sales price. This all gets taken into account too, when we consider whether to release an extension.
We actually have an Excel spreadsheet that we use internally at Polished Geek to estimate all of these factors, to see what the viability of an extension is, at different prices and sales levels. It's not perfect at predicting the future profitability of an extension, but doing that analysis at least helps us work through considering all the relevant factors before setting a price and releasing an extension to the public. Otherwise you can find yourself selling an extension for $95, bringing in a lot of cash flow at first, and still actually be losing money when compared to the other project work that could be done with that time instead.
All of these things go into deciding whether to sell code as an extension, and how much to charge for it. The price has to be attractive to buyers AND allow the sale of that extension to generate as much profit, or more, than the other profitable work a business could be doing instead. Otherwise it just doesn't make good business sense to do it.
If you've read this far, I hope my ramblings have been an interesting peek into the world of an extension vendor. Our community is made up of a huge variety of freelancers, boutique firms and web design companies, all with different expertise and business models, all trying to make a living. When we all succeed and can put food on the table doing what we love, the open source community gets stronger. When it becomes too hard to eek out a living for a certain type of business, eventually those businesses turn elsewhere or go under, and the open source community as a whole suffers. We're all interdependent on one another. I think it's important that we do whatever we can to support each others success.
HIKASHOP ESSENTIAL 49,95€The basic version. With the main features for a little shop.
HIKAMARKETAdd-on Create a multivendor platform. Enable many vendors on your website.
HIKASERIALAdd-on Sale e-tickets, vouchers, gift certificates, serial numbers and more!
MARKETPLACEPlugins, modules and other kinds of integrations for HikaShop
HIKAAUCTION 40€Add-on Create auctions and let your customers bid for products.
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