Open Source, Incentives, and Why 'Monetize Later' Often Backfires

For a long time, I strongly believed in open source and paying it forward to the developer community. At the same time, over the years, I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of how open source plays out in developer tooling. Not because I stopped believing in it, but because I’ve watched too many tools / frameworks I depended on quietly change direction. They start permissive and community-first, gain massive adoption, and then introduce license shifts, feature gating, or enterprise-only tiers once business pressure mounts. We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly: Terraform > OpenTofu, Redis > Valkey, Elastic > OpenSearch. After enough of these cycles, it’s hard not to become a little cynical. In some ways, SaaS starts to feel more honest at least the incentives are explicit from day one. Trying to understand why this keeps happening, one pattern stands out. Many of the most durable open-source tools and frameworks such as VS Code, React, Kubernetes, and Backstage - were built by companies wher