> The only downside I see is that it’s definitely led to the proliferation of commercializing OSS libs by making them slightly worse on purpose and adding a “go

> The only downside I see is that it’s definitely led to the proliferation of commercializing OSS libs by making them slightly worse on purpose and adding a “go pro!” version This is a slightly pessimistic take on open core :) I'm personally a big fan, as opposed to libraries that are not maintained and die. Sidekiq's competitor, Resque, has a somewhat uncertain situation (it's been dead for an year or so, then new maintainers took over). The advantage of open core is that nobody prevents devs to create their own plugins, especially for products that are accessible to developers without highly specific knowledge (say, a relational database); this is actually happening with Sidekiq - for example, there is a plugin for a more granular scheduler.