In theory you’re right, but in most companies the friction of spinning up a team to manage the custom patch set of each piece of open-core software they use wou

In theory you’re right, but in most companies the friction of spinning up a team to manage the custom patch set of each piece of open-core software they use would dominate the actual effort needed to implement the features. It’s just not in most company’s DNA to operate this way. (Also, a lot of SaaS is in fact cheaper than what a dev makes in half a year).