This is such a good post. I'm pretty humbled by your words about us being "everywhere that's of interest" and that "we're highly respected." It's hard to see that when you're in the weeds, so I just wanted to say I appreciate it.
Regarding proprietary…I get it. I was the CEO of BlazingSQL, and we were fully OSS with an open-core model. The number of Fortune 500 customers that were deploying us at scale but not paying us in money, feedback, or testimonials was honestly heartbreaking.
When Josh (our CEO) and I were in the early days of Voltron Data, we thought maybe we could hold ourselves accountable to the open-source community with a new model, which we now call open-periphery, where, as you said, the interchanges, standards, and protocols are open, allowing companies and developers to build resilient, evolvable data stacks.
Open-periphery also means we don't have to debate what goes back to the community and what goes into the proprietary code because there is such a clear delineation. Open-periphery is our way of thinking about OSS business models, and it's the solution we came up with to ensure we can continue to invest in open-source and next-generation query engines.