> I can only speculate, but I suspect Synadia's existential crisis is self-inflicted. If you look at their product offering, there's simply little reason for any company to pay for a support contract; they made NATS incredibly easy to self-host, and what you get (support and a nice dashboard UI) doesn't stand out as particularly valuable.

This is just a really sad incentive in place nowadays. If you make something that’s easy to self-host, and open source it, you might end up with a popular project that’s just not financially sustainable. So you see people either overengineering their architecture to the point it’s painful to host, reaching out for a more restrictive licensing, or both (looking at you, Sentry... not judging though).

Of course, there’s the open core model as well. There are also mischiefs that pretend their product is open core and enable some features behind a license key, but everything is open source in the repo. (A YC startup, nonetheless! Not calling names because I don’t want to jinx it, but if it was intentional – you have my deepest respect. And I promise I’ll pay you plenty, once I have some money to sustain myself.)

So... there might be a spirit of open source somewhere in these “commercial open source startups”, but it’s usually in those that don’t play pretend open source. And in there, money still comes first, of course.