i see your point, in that light what herdr is doing here make sense. keep some part open (e.g. runtime or whatever that means, or the front-end, or the user-facing logic, etc) and move the business-logic/etc to proprietary. So you get to customize the software to meet your needs, and at the same time to create some revenue incentive to grow the company.

alternative is to collect/sell usage data, which is icky, or provide something as a service (token usage, infra, plugins, etc)