I'll mention I hate this style of conversation. You call up a vendor, and ask about X. They switch to talking point Y, without ever addressing the point.
It's ubiquitous ("it's me, not you"), but I hate it.
I'd much rather get a straight "no."
To answer the non-answer: I don't want a crippled version of the product with features held back for paying customers. I don't know which other features will be held back in the future, or what the evolution of the system will be. My expectation is that at some point, I'll need e.g. features to comply with a law like GDPR, and some critical feature may be withheld in an attempt to monetize me.
When that happens, I end up in limbo.
With a half-open-source project, what do you do? Do you fork the system and build the feature yourself? It will never move into mainstream since it undermines your revenue source. Do you maintain a fork? No one will use your fork over mainstream and you have competing communities. Etc.
Having built systems which have been used and maintained for decades, those sorts of considerations matter much more for picking a long-term viable solution than which technology happens to be ahead this year. I'm not saying you're going to burn me (and usually by the time this happens, you've been acquired by Oracle like Java, went bankrupt and got picked up by vultures, like SCO, hired a massive number of mediocre people, like Google), but if you make a dozen decisions like this, someone WILL burn you, and that WILL cost you more than the other 11 decisions combined.
It's ubiquitous ("it's me, not you"), but I hate it.
I'd much rather get a straight "no."
To answer the non-answer: I don't want a crippled version of the product with features held back for paying customers. I don't know which other features will be held back in the future, or what the evolution of the system will be. My expectation is that at some point, I'll need e.g. features to comply with a law like GDPR, and some critical feature may be withheld in an attempt to monetize me.
When that happens, I end up in limbo.
With a half-open-source project, what do you do? Do you fork the system and build the feature yourself? It will never move into mainstream since it undermines your revenue source. Do you maintain a fork? No one will use your fork over mainstream and you have competing communities. Etc.
Having built systems which have been used and maintained for decades, those sorts of considerations matter much more for picking a long-term viable solution than which technology happens to be ahead this year. I'm not saying you're going to burn me (and usually by the time this happens, you've been acquired by Oracle like Java, went bankrupt and got picked up by vultures, like SCO, hired a massive number of mediocre people, like Google), but if you make a dozen decisions like this, someone WILL burn you, and that WILL cost you more than the other 11 decisions combined.
Make it easy on customers like me.