Nobody will touch your product if it's not OSS doesn't mean you should call it OSS and then rug pull. Build it proprietary from the beginning you cowards. The people who do this are the same as the corporate shills who infiltrate subcultures to monetize them and ultimately destroy the community in the process. If you don't actually share the values of the community you're trying to join, then don't join it.
This little SV "growth hack" where the success of your OSS project is the proving ground to get funding has to die. It's turning a high-trust community into a low-trust one.
It doesn’t make sense to people who contribute small hobby projects or work as researchers / are government funded, which means ultimately paid for by businesses and consumers thereof.
OSS in business works well when you make your money on something other than the software. Because you're giving it way in it's entirety. Facebook with React, Google with k8s, Twitter with Redis. Once you need the software itself to generate revenue it all falls apart.
How many businesses whose core competency is writing software realizing that there's no 1st party advantage to hosting and AWS is better than you at it will it take for those businesses to not literally give away the only asset the company has with any value?
This is the primary appeal of open source software to most businesses - free software and free labor.
An open source project that doesn’t receive in kind development cost reduction benefit from free contributors should not stay open source.
Where it exists in a small community of other developers, most of whom have a similar mindset, it works fine.
And for very popular projects, there’s enough users for whom it makes economic sense to have some devs on staff to support their usage, tailor stuff, and keep it moving forward to maintain the project.
But in the middle, where most things are, it kinda doesn’t work.