But the main issue is that doesn't work anymore if LLMs have been trained entirely on the free and can generate the premium with ease.
Also, I'd guess, the sort of people who are comfortable with asking an LLM to build the premium features are, uh, morally flexible enough to not care about licenses in the first place.
I don’t think this will be possible for many open core projects. Often the premium features are the more complex and difficult ones. If you could generate those you don’t need the project at all anymore you can just generate the whole thing. Of course that is the wet dream of VCs and would make programmers completely obsolete but I don’t think it’s realistic (at least not anytime soon)
Well, no. Most people in the world get paid for doing a thing. I pay someone $X and they do Y for me and then I have the Y that I wanted done.
This can work for software too. Someone pays me to develop software that does something useful for them, and then they have the thing they wanted. For example if Wine is missing a feature someone can pay me to implement it, and then everyone involved is happy.
I agree it's a more challenging business model, but it does work.
It sounds to me that this would invite an insane level of bloat and one-off features.
In the end product is being sold originally to fund that development. Software can also be pure product enabling company to do something or consumer to do something. But in that case open-source is likely incidental. Not the product.
Obviously, SSO is the best choice for most deployments. Enterprises (who will probably pay the most) will require SSO.
Open Source is the "free taste". Everyone knows, uses, and likes Grafana. When your company is looking for something, you'll recommend it because you're familiar with it. Your company will want things like SCIM or similar, and pay them for it.
It's harder for products that are trying to sell to smaller companies/individuals, but it still applies.