The story the essay paints is that for "open core" to be profitable, eventually the company will have to make the "free" version basically unattractive compared

The story the essay paints is that for "open core" to be profitable, eventually the company will have to make the "free" version basically unattractive compared to the paid one. It is described as basically a "freemium" model. So what is the difference between this and if it just weren't open source at all? I see the marketing benefit to the producers of having people consider it "open source", even though eventually they'll be locked in and have to pay for the value they want. What is the benefit to the consumer? Real question. I'm not certain there is none. Perhaps the open core being truly open source, at least other developers can look at that code as a learning resource, or even fork it into something else? (Note that requires it being really open source, that is legally forkable under a really open source license that will allow it to achieve a life of it's own. Entities trying to do "open core" where the core is licensed under a non-OSI-approved license... we could talk about that). I could be persuaded that makes it better than if it were just proprietary license altogether? Anything else?