COSS companies viewing their OSS community as a "competitor" are mistaken. This is an easy error to make. The OSS community users do not "convert" over to customers. They are individuals often working at companies (actual customers) and/or are too skilled to justify "upgrading".
Further, OSS users are often a mix of sophisticated developer contributors, users, individual consumers, competitors, partners, etc. In many cases, these constituents will never pay the COSS company a single cent, but they are fundamentally crucial to invest significantly in.
Conflating OSS users with "competitors" or "potential customers" is a big mistake. COSS companies sell to businesses/companies with budgets (largely enterprises) and the buying motions here are changing tremendously.
There are cases where COSS companies sell a service to individual user accounts with paid tiers and 1:1 features that are valuable and isolated to an individual only, but in the VAST majority of cases, real revenue scalability comes from team/collaboration/enterprise use cases.
So, as a COSS company, focus on maximizing value creation for all stakeholders - chief among them being the OSS user/consumer community who are NOT competitors/customers but instead extended engineering, distribution, product, quality, testing, distribution and validation levers.
