> features necessary for a startup to succeed will be APL, and part of the open core; a feature which is primarily useful only to an already successful company

> features necessary for a startup to succeed will be APL, and part of the open core; a feature which is primarily useful only to an already successful company will be CCL, and part of the enterprise product. This sounds like an excellent guiding principle to strive for in an open-core development model. There's definitely still a fine line to walk to determine how to apply that principle to each new feature, but it's encouraging to see that they've at least put enough thought to arrive at a reasonable-sounding compromise to hold themselves to. I personally still vastly prefer to use and build products that are entirely open, funded through hosted SaaS services and support contracts, but that model definitely doesn't fit very well for infrastructure products like databases where a very significant portion of the user base would prefer to self host. And speaking as a pragmatist, if a open-core product's paid features genuinely only become useful once a product reaches a scale where licensing costs become insignificant relative to the revenue generated by the product, and the source code for those paid features are readily available to be inspected and extended, then as far as I'm concerned it's as good as any fully open-source alternative from a licensing perspective. I'd much rather see companies use a open-core model like this that makes reasonable compromises in order to sustain their business rather than close off their product entirely. This is especially important for core infrastructure products like databases, where the difference between open-core and fully proprietary often means the difference between a product worthy of a cautious evaluation and one that's simply a non-option for many developers, myself included. And that's always a shame because there are some very promising proprietary products like this that I simply refuse to consider using in a early stage product due to feature/scaling/deployment/licensing restrictions (Datomic being the one that's always lingering in the back of my mind).