Even in the situation I described, the original company would leave the free / client side version on the site as free marketing. This is the standard today for

Even in the situation I described, the original company would leave the free / client side version on the site as free marketing. This is the standard today for enterprise-monetised open source software. Solving this problem isn't about being local-first. It's about being local-last. You have to be able to make more money by selling a software license than you make by selling equity and chasing user acquisition and retention. Then we'll see people waking up to the fact that all this proprietary data is a liability and subscriptions are golden handcuffs and people will finally get back to making real software again