(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but this post is my personal opinion, as someone who has believed strongly in the moral superiority of Open Source, since befor

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but this post is my personal opinion, as someone who has believed strongly in the moral superiority of Open Source, since before I even knew such a term existed) tl;dr, no. If you make a great piece of software and then license it in a way that allows for cost-free redistribution, you're definitely going to struggle to make money if your models are all focussed around making money from distribution :) You used the specific phrase "FOSS product" and then talked about various approaches - none of which are actually FOSS products. There is certainly a lot of FOSS involved, but to me, the "product" is what you sell, and everything else is infrastructure. In each of those cases, what is being sold as a product, mostly isn't even software, it's access to updates (as opposed to the updates themselves), access to support, etc. Only the open core approach is really relevant, and it's a terrible model full of horrible tensions. I think that the difficulty of making a truly "FOSS product" is one of the big reasons why Linux on the desktop will never happen. High quality desktop applications are really hard to write, and there's very little opportunity to sell something around them, or use them to build something more. Linux on the server, or Linux in devices though, happened easily because who doesn't want to get all of the infrastructure you need to build cool/useful products/services, for ~nothing! So, in summary, IMHO FOSS shines for infrastructure projects, and it's possible to make money from those, but usually only really by using them to make something else.