For people wondering if switching to the red hat model has worked for chef - super yes. It’s for others to give details, but I wouldn’t do the open core model again, if I wasn’t building on an existing free software island.
Selling the whole product, and having the whole product be open source, and having third party produced builds, collaborating together, it’s better on, I suspect, every angle.
It’s less clear you could begin this way, but I think you could. If we had, it would’ve been less of a shock to parts of the chef community. Not hearing a single conversation about lack of differentiation is like being in a hot tub, if you lived 13 years of it.
If you’re on the fence, don’t be. Do it. It wasn’t a fluke of the market, or some special thing only RH knows how to do. What you have to do, in short:
1) produce a product based 100% on open source code. 2) be the sole distributor of that product, based on your trademark, under whatever commercial terms make sense for your business. 3) encourage and collaborate with folks who want to build alternative distributions
(This is on top of the things you need to do to run a thriving open source project and community - which are table stakes, but still real hard, and nobody is perfect at)
But compare that to your mental checklist of open core. Don’t do it if you don’t have to, my friends.
