A lot of the software on this list is "freemium" open source. For example Strapi and SuperTokens are open source. But require a paid plan/license when growing the application to a bigger scale, because you are going to need their paid features at some point.
Would "freemium" mean "currently trying to leverage free labour from external developers while gaining traction, at which point we'll switch to closed source with an abandonware 'free' version in order to extort companies who have found themselves with vendor lock into what they thought was free software but actually isn't"?
That's very often the path forward. The community usually doesn't invest a lot into those projects, so they rarely get forked into a community driven version. Some projects like that are also a minefield, because they mix code with different licenses in one repository.
Exactly! That was kind of the point of this to pick freemium software which gives me more confidence of the future of the project in oppose to free open-source without a proper business model.
I don't agree that this model of open source software has a positive impact on the quality and future of the open source core. Usually the open source part gets less and less usable and lacks more and more documentation. It also scares off external contributors.
I think both models have some space in the open source community. You can still learn and get value from a commercial product even if they only share the source code.
