[stuntprogrammer]

It's not obvious to me that an open core business can sustain the necessary margins to be interesting as an engineering company rather than a glorified services business. There are been very few examples (friend of mine argues it's just RedHat).

You are correct though that their model over the years has been to extract a large amount, up front, from a small number of users. They (mostly FD) have failed to make the leap to users outside finance due to what I'd call cultural reasons. They also lack strong technical leadership imnsho (they're, at heart, not an engineering company).

I'd certainly take a swing at doing an open source version for them but not clear to me that they'd know how to play it.