"The way forward" is very subjective and depends on what your goals are in open-sourcing your project. If you are trying to drive adoption for your product lik

"The way forward" is very subjective and depends on what your goals are in open-sourcing your project. If you are trying to drive adoption for your product like AMD GPUs on Linux or FSR then open-sourcing with a liberal free software license makes perfect sense. If you worked on a hobby project and you are no longer interested in it and just want to put it out there to help someone else along who might be interested in the future, open-sourcing with a free software license makes sense. If you want to control anything about how your product is used (outside of something like GPL) then using a more restrictive license or only open sourcing parts of your product ("open core") makes sense, like you describe. I don't think there's anything wrong with any approach to open source as long as it's explicitly communicated to the user.