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This is all true and good as long as you keep in mind that open source is not a business model. You can make money with oss, but sometimes we have idealistic views of that and the hard truth is that it's very very hard to be sustainable financially.

And with free money drying up I think we will start to see a lot of startups realized that painfully and move to more restrictive licenses.

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License bait and switch is a promising business model though, lure in the suckers with a liberal license, just make sure that contributors sign a CLA. Then you can hit them with a change to an onerous license after you have gained traction and a commanding market share.

I can think of plenty of companies that are or have tried this. However I can’t think of many that have done so with notable future success. It mostly seems to be a defensive/reactive move by players having their work more effectively monetised by others than a pre-planned strategy. Boil-the-frog SaaS price increases on the other hand seems to be the default strategy. I am curious to see how well this will work as everyone gets squeezed.

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