Which many developers only adopted, because they didn't had to pay anything, while the tool maker's salaries were being burned by VC money.
We are probably not going to see mass investment by VCs in free software for awhile (perhaps never, but that is pretty strong), but developers will keep scratching our itch.
And maybe more and more developers and users will realise that AGPL/GPL/LGP are the only licenses which truly protect one’s software.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of the cause of the issue with redis, or hashicorp, or elasticsearch etc;
This wasn't some nefarious third party taking all the community good will and contributions and creating a private fork to kill the original projects.
If you don't want some corporate asshole to turn your open source project into a get rich quick scheme, don't give control of your project to that asshole.
I think you somehow missed the point where Redis the project existed and was extremely popular before it was owned by what is now Redis the company.
The competition for redis in the early days wasn't paid alternatives, it was other open source alternatives; Redis just provided a more featured solution.
It wasn't a "demo" for a paid product funded by corporate dollars or VC funding, it was just a thing that someone created, and released as an open source project.
It's hilarious that you think the companies dropping open source licenses for the products they bought are going to stop the industry using open source. As I said originally, it's going to have the opposite affect: it's going to make the industry embrace the very nature of open source and create forks of projects, the moment there's a sniff of a corporate buy out, specifically because of this type of activity.
The ongoing uptake in open core, shows where it goes.
I find it hard to believe many if any would see "create an open source tool" as a method to become a millionaire.