We had a lively discussion over open source business models over dinner last night.
Conventional wisdom says that you should build a large community of users, and then you'll figure out how you monetize a subset of those users. The standard argument that follows is that you'll offer a SaaS version of the open source for those users who don't want to deal with self-hosting.
I'm not sure that argument holds. If you have a technical user who is perfectly capable of self-hosting, and I would argue even gets joy out of doing so, why would that user let go of that joy and pay up?
The inevitable path then is a license change (Business Source, anyone?), or even going entirely closed-source (e.g. Panther did that)
Curious to hear how everyone thinks about this topic, both from a user and provider perspective.
Many years ago, I installed and managed OpenWRT on my routers, and FreeNAS on a home-built NAS. It was fun and interesting for a while, but I grew tired of the maintenance and keeping up. It had moved from hobby and became a job. I was full-time network administrator for my own house.
People are infinitely variable. Some will get a lot of fulfillment out of doing it themselves. Some will not. Some will lose interest in self-hosting, but still want your service. There might even be someone who makes an OSS version of the services that you offer for money (see SorryCypress)
Avoid getting too wrapped up in the psychology of your users.