Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. > Half the "open source" projects are mixed license these days. I can sympathize though. For the folks who built companie

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. > Half the "open source" projects are mixed license these days. I can sympathize though. For the folks who built companies around making something awesome and having it available as open-source software, they did so out of the implicit assumption they’d be the natural ones people would pay for “support”. Other people were free to use the software, but other than explicit “I make this freely available it’s just a utility” software, the assumption was that people wouldn’t just fork it and make a business that wraps it (especially without contributing back). Some folks tried open core (as you describe), but it’s pretty painful for both parties. It’s not fun as an engineer to know “this feature this person wants is just arbitrarily disabled in the community edition”, while knowing “Sigh, and because they aren’t willing to pay us, we need to make money somehow”. I think the current battle over “who can turn it into a service” is actually a pretty interesting one. I found the AGPL to be a fiasco (the way it was written it could be interpreted as a legal virus, defeating even incidental DIY usage), but have more hope for seeing a license that says “Cloud providers can’t just monetize our work; people are still free to run it themselves though as DIY”. For open source to continue to prosper, it’ll have to figure out the business model.