The problem isn't making a commercial business model around open source, but doing so in a way that has the opportunity to achieve the levels of return VCs expe

The problem isn't making a commercial business model around open source, but doing so in a way that has the opportunity to achieve the levels of return VCs expect. IMHO the best returns in open source don't come from early monetization, but from growing a community so much that the open source product's brand value becomes attractive to the largest enterprise-focused service organizations like IBM, Oracle, RedHat, etc. IMHO this is basically the end-game that MongoDB is gunning for. Charging for a premium product early on when you instead angle for owning a large chunk of major category of software globally like webservers is naïve. Owning the brand of a major du jour technology keeps big enterprise service orgs top of mind with CIOs and CTOs.