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hunter that's why your licensing is super important. If you don't lock it down you are doing free R&D for giant firms who have the money to make you, but will just rip you off if they can. I speak from extensive OSS experience. The feelgood of giving away wears off, make the right choices with regard to IP and you can capture the value you are creating for people who use it.

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This is a really good point. Competitors in this space have a lot of resources so there's a tightrope to walk if you go the OSS core route. Any of these competitors could leverage your core and provide many more features than you could reasonably implement.

BSL/BUSL seems like a good fit for licensing here. It's technically source available instead of open source but just adds the layer that a competitor can't be built using your core. Otherwise the core is free to modify and fork. AGPL might be an option but I fear it would scare off a lot of companies in the space who have policies against AGPL licensed code but you'd get to keep advertising as OSS.

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