As a maintainer of a a relatively tiny "open source" project, I've been going through the same thing over the last few months. People relied on the project, ok let's go open-core 99% is free, a few obscure features require a license key.
Now I'm seeing cloud providers built on top of my project with almost no significant changes (other than I guess bypassing my licensing mechanism) and they contribute nothing in terms of support or code.
Now I'm building out the cloud service and am slowly moving away from this being an open source project to more like a project that has some code that you can see and a public issue tracker.
I have several pitch decks/one pagers ready to go and written up for VCs but have been hesitant due the reasoning in this article.
But there is soon coming a time when I will have to pull the trigger and send those emails.
Now I'm seeing cloud providers built on top of my project with almost no significant changes (other than I guess bypassing my licensing mechanism) and they contribute nothing in terms of support or code.
Now I'm building out the cloud service and am slowly moving away from this being an open source project to more like a project that has some code that you can see and a public issue tracker.
I have several pitch decks/one pagers ready to go and written up for VCs but have been hesitant due the reasoning in this article.
But there is soon coming a time when I will have to pull the trigger and send those emails.