It's easy, you release it open source... Then make sure you have languages "officially" promote it in their documentation and have people adopt it thinking it's

It's easy, you release it open source... Then make sure you have languages "officially" promote it in their documentation and have people adopt it thinking it's great and an actively developed project that's going to be around forever, etc... And then fork it, stop releasing security updates for the older (open-source) versions, and turn it into a product that you charge people for because corporates are now dependent on it. For a real-life example of it, see this blatant bait and switch fuckery: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/26489 https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/26489