Just clarifying, your alternative to open core is open nothing? Just proprietary it up?
My main point was you should get these ducks in order first and be genuine with your intentions. Don't use FOSS as a growth hack, it never ends well for the creator or the user. I don't think HyperDX is genuine with their intentions, as with all open core, it's all kumbaya FOSS until you start encroaching on their enterprise feature set.
I think that HyperDX is a bit different from tools like Mongo, Redis or Hashicorp in that we're a vertically integrated product from SDKs/UIs to ingestion pipeline and DBs, which is opposite kind of offering from done by the above companies (which has made them more vulnerable to the kind of rug pull you mentioned)
We're trying to be permissive with freedoms granted to the user of our code, while still maintaining governance over the project to make it sustainable.
We don't want to be source-available, as that's pretty much the opposite of what we want to accomplish (and is why we consciously did not pick a license such as BSL/SSPL/etc.)
How do you plan on doing that while being VC-backed? Why did you choose to be VC backed in the first place? You can create a sustainable open source project and community without any VC funding.
Interestingly, it seems like "HyperDX" might've been part of their original product offering that they decided to open source--their main website (https://www.deploysentinel.com) doesn't include any references to "HyperDX for CI" in May of 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230321102146/https://www.deplo.... Seems like they're pivoting to metrics? Even more of a reason to be weary about this.
The open core model relies on a delicate balance of ensuring that the OSS product is featureful and standalone, while successfully monetizing value added features for advanced users and enterprise customers. Not many companies do this right, but there are those that understand and handle this balance well, and manage to have both a successful OSS and commercial product. Grafana comes to mind, for example.
Just because you think that SSO is a required feature that should be part of the OSS product doesn't mean that HyperDX is using OSS as a growth hack. Nor is it fair to label a young startup that for a product that just launched.
FWIW I agree with their decision to make SSO a paid feature, but we can go over any number of features, and some OSS user is guaranteed to demand a specific feature, yet will not be willing to pay for it. SSO is not special, unless it's a core feature that the product depends on, which doesn't seem to be the case here.
When done right, open core is the best model to monetize OSS projects, and we should be thankful that companies adopt it at all. I'd use an open core product before a proprietary one any day of the week.