I found it kinda surprising (it's kinda tough when a primary DB choice is no longer open source!), although not that surprising given the fact that this keeps happening to VC-backed DB startups.
Patreon and pray or go broke?
The Redhat model just doesn’t work in 2024 with the sharks constantly looking for fresh meat.
I truly believe that the Red Hat model is still possible to achieve today, but the barrier of entry is much higher than before. What sets Red Hat apart from many of these VC backed projects is what they actually offer. Red Hat doesn't primarily provide "services" or singular components like a database^, but delivers platforms.
RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible Automation Platform, OpenStack, Satellite, etc, are the aggregation of many open source projects tied together to make an offering appealing and attractive to enterprises. They produce the infrastructure and management layers of the stack that all your services and applications are deployed on. Working at this level enables a very different degree of flexibility and "safety" in comparison to single application or SaaS style offerings.
There's distinct boundaries of their products as well from the upstream variants: Fedora vs CentOS vs RHEL, OKD/SCOS vs OCP/RHCOS, RDO vs RHOSO, Ansible ecosystem vs AAP, etc. Red Hat also delivers on support, training/education, partner-driven sales, and OEM integration/certification.
^ Main exception would really be the Java middleware solutions, but the Runtimes and Integration offerings could be argued as a platform of their own. Same with RHEL/OpenShift AI.
I mean, half the reason they sold to IBM is because even Redhat didn’t think they could withstand the assault from Amazon as a standalone entity…
Very few people are complaining about existance of commercial products. People get unhappy when company starts by claiming "open source", attracts followers, and then suddenly becomes "closed source".