As someone who wants to write open source but needs to be able to capture some financial value from doing that to be able to make it sustainable, what model do you prefer?
My current thoughts lean towards a fully functional open source product with a HashiCorp style BSL and commercial licensing for teams above a size threshold.
I think the open core model is fine, and the most financially sustainable. Just be up front about it from day 1. I don't think the honor system for licensing will get you the results you're wanting.
it depends strongly on why you want to write open source. if you like the idea of putting source code out into the world for other people to use and benefit from then go ahead and use whatever mix of open source and proprietary code you like, just be up front that that's what you are doing.
if you want to promise open source software simply to attract the mindshare and users who habitually ignore anything that isn't open source, trying to capture financial value may well be infeasible unless some rare confluence of stars lines up for you. the key is in the word "capture" - capturing the value implies making sure it goes to you rather than to someone else, and that means imposing restrictions that will simply piss those same users off.
I can't imagine that works very well for relatively small, simple, functional or intuitive projects though. Incentives wise, is it possible to sell reverse support: extracting payment for all the times the product works so well that support isn't needed?
My current thoughts lean towards a fully functional open source product with a HashiCorp style BSL and commercial licensing for teams above a size threshold.