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I think you sell short the promise of true open source, which gives us much more than what open core can offer, in a more sustainable way. I find it endearing that you in effect attack purists for not being thankful for unusable crapheaps like gitlab. Let's admit those projects were all relevant a decade ago , but have all become very stagnant and painful to use our maintain because of their open core fragmentation and technical debt in the open product. I know they have been replaced in my own usage and orgs. Imagine if Linux was Open Core, and we were supposed to be thankful for even that, and pay the Linux foundation for Linux Pro if we needed a commercial grade kernel. That'd be like having to buy AT&T Unix again, right? There would be a fork in order, right? Too much has been sacrificed to accept a partly non free kernel. But suddenly this idea comes along that the project needs to support a company on its back. And suddenly the company only cares about delivering the bare minimum open source than is necessary to annoy clients into the Enterprise version. The open product chokes, and a real open competitor appears. We migrate from gitlab to gitea, from MySQL to MariaDB, from redis to valkey, and so on. Open source is more important than your or my company. If either open source or our company has to die, it's far better to elect for our company to die, rather than threaten open source. Likewise, any company that threatens open source with the open core model will eventually fail or fall behind genuine open source competitors. If you build a company on open source, why not let it be fully free, selling services, support, and consulting? I think the days of Open-Washing via Open Core are coming to an end. The last 15 years have seen it betray so many previously lively communities. I strongly believe that in the future, open projects will have to be fully open to merit credit, or the community will immediately recognize them as bad actors, and standardize on a truly open alternative. |