[ctalledo]

We felt just providing enterprise support would not be sufficient to create a healthy business, given that Sysbox is designed to work under the covers (i.e., under docker/containerd) and does not require a lot of support. We opted for the open-core model as we felt it creates a good balance between contributing to the container ecosystem while still allowing us to sell some enterprise-level functionality (rather than just support).

Regarding the conflict of interest, we decided to handle it as follows: features that mainly benefit practitioners would go on the open-core, while features that mainly benefit enterprise deployments would not. Of course, there is still ambiguity there, but that will need to resolved on a feature by feature basis based on the feedback from practitioners and enterprises.

This is a learning process for us, but we understand this model is being used successfully by other IT infrastructure companies such as HashiCorp, so we opted for it.