Open source has become a marketing / sales strategy. Start out with something that is free, brought into a company by their own engineers. Then when the company

Open source has become a marketing / sales strategy. Start out with something that is free, brought into a company by their own engineers. Then when the company starts to adopt it broadly, they charge for Enterprise level support and features. And it works. From an investor perspective, it's great to see a strong top end funnel, prior to investing. With open core products, that's pretty straight forward. There customer / product development is present through feature requests and, if popular enough, you get some free work. In practice, that might be a big driver upfront, but isn't a huge motivator as it grows. Additionally, open-source devs are a great and passionate early adopter group. So, all in all, tons of upside to going the open-core route. However, the open source community isn't dumb and there are signs that, en masse, they are tired of getting used.