I think it has been said in the past on HN that open source in itself is not a business model. It can be part of a business model to keep a community around a s

I think it has been said in the past on HN that open source in itself is not a business model. It can be part of a business model to keep a community around a specific variant of the software, but most of the attempts to switch to a more restrictive source-available type of licence are usually met with a massive shrink of the community and potentially a fork if the product had enough traction (see e.g. Elastic vs OpenSearch). My approach would be to land a high paid tech job using the traction my product has, potentially being paid part of my time to work on it while it still stays open source. Alternatively, you might think about maintaining a more restricitvely licensed premium version that has features so compelling above the community version (and everything else on the market), that corporations would love to pay for it. Another point hindering big corporate from incorporating your product into their pipeline might be the bus factor. What happens if you break both arms? Who will do the bug fixes? So building a cash producing start up around an open source dev tool is one of the hardest things I can imagine except for maybe consulting work around the tool itself.