I run a company that organically reached self service SaaS and inside sales. We make borerline developer tools and an open source strategy is very tempting because selling horizontally (Not to a specific vertical) is really hard. Here's a long rant on my thinking about this ( a topic that's been on my mind a lot)

In our case, we make NLP tools, loads of companies have text and data scientists and our tools should be a good fit. But during a potential customers development journey, the buying window is small, they need to know they have the problem we solve, know about us and also not have found or planned an alternative solution yet.

That in turn makes things hard, because often times potential customers come to us too early in their journey to derive value from our product (we make sense when you have N>3 people doing stuff). It makes onboarding and first impressions really hard, because the user knows they might need this one day but isn't in a state to reach wow right now and leaves with an underwhelming first impression.

Open source is very tempting because it looks like it can circumvent those problems. The entry point into an organization becomes the mind of developers and practitioners (as opposed to our slightly more senior buying persona).

The aha moment for that persona is different, and because the persona is a developer and the product is a developer tool the aha moment is easier to convey in an open source setting.

Said differently, in developer tools the buying persona and user persona are different. Often you can reach the using persona but targeting the buyer from day 1 will lead to underwhelming results. Open source let's you capture the minds and hearts of your users, which god willing, will champion your product to the buying persona of the org.