You nailed it with the first part. Another big example is Mesosphere. Yes, you can open source everything* (my company does) because most B2B customers don't

You nailed it with the first part. Another big example is Mesosphere. Yes, you can open source everything* (my company does) because most B2B customers don't want to bother running it. Most small ones would rather just use your SaaS and not have to run and maintain some boxes, if they're even that technical. Not to mention cloud pricing these days is complexed and nuanced when your app uses a bunch of services and deals with lots of inbound and outbound traffic — more things customers don't want to deal with. Most big companies want support around the clock and are used to going for enterprise licensing deals. At the end of the day, you're providing a solution to their problems, and hosting and running the code for them makes solving their problem and their lives easier. If a problem costs them $50k in lost revenue or opportunities, and you solve it for $45k, you have a happy customer, even if they could have done a lot of work and run it themselves for say $20k. I don't think this works as well in the B2C space, but it really depends on the price point of your service and your user base. For instance, I run a Ghost blog because I can have the skills to install and maintain it, which isn't much, and they charge $20/mo for their SaaS while I can run it on DigitalOcean for $5/mo. *except a small bit of secret sauce