You’re correct, but I want to emphasize a point from your comment: ElasticSearch only earns a lot of money because they have a very good monetization strategy f

You’re correct, but I want to emphasize a point from your comment: ElasticSearch only earns a lot of money because they have a very good monetization strategy for their managed clusters. Open sourcing your product absolutely requires that you have a proper monetization strategy in mind, it should not be an afterthought. I’ve seen too many startups fail because they were not able to capitalize on the momentum they have gotten with their opensource version; projects such as rethinkdb come to mind. Once you have a solid plan, by all means, release an open source version. But remember, once that cat is out of the bag, it’s hard to put it back in.