Yep. The author complains that there used to be plucky startups with Open Core business models who've now gone "extinct", while simultaneously sharpening their pitchforks because those same companies got successful and _slightly_ amended their licenses to prevent loosing revenue against IaaS giants so that they can, in turn, continue innovating. I guess money grows on trees where they live.
The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'.
The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other existing tooling. The open core part was injected when the startup decided it had to turn into a platform to sustain the beefy staffing budgets while they figured out how to generate revenue off something that was freely available.
I'm not sure what the alternative is or what you are advocating. Antirez stopped working on Redis 4 years ago. We were lucky someone created Redis "for the love of the game". Now before you there are a couple options
1. Antirez2 pops up and works on Redis because they love working on Redis
2. Someone is incentivized, with money, to work on Redis.
(1) didn't happen, so we must go with (2), and with (2) comes the problem of the actual business model that will be used to sustain (2).
A. Donations/Support contracts
B. Open "Core" aka I'm the only one allowed to sell this as SaaS.
Method (A) has shown to be an abject failure while AWS takes your revenue. Companies have successfully chosen method (B). Either you have a method (C) in mind, or you just aren't being reasonable in asking people to work on OSS for free. You can be mad about the "rugpull", but between the choice of "rugpull" and abandon the project, I don't see how "rugpull" is the worse option
There's plenty of people / groups willing to work on Redis without direct monetary compensation, as the plethora of forks have shown. They don't need to be 'asked'.
The only problem is that the people who bought the copyright now want an ROI.
