SaaS is a common way for open source companies to create revenue, look no further than WordPress, GitLab, Databricks, DataStax, and many others. Kudos to the opstrace team for taking this path.
There’s nothing inherently dishonest when a company emphasizes their open source strategy. Open source community building is as much about shipping code as it is leading people, and that requires you to be transparent about your intentions. I’ve interpreted opstrace’s release as just that.
I think the concern about neutral project governance is an important one. It’s early days, but from what I’ve seen it seems clear what is being sold vs what is open today. The fact that the project is released under the Apache v2 license means that folks are able to reuse, distribute, and sell the project as they wish — even fork it if they dislike the direction. That said, if governance is a priority for your use I’d definitely look to project in neutral software foundations like the Apache Software Foundation and CNCF.
Re: other high-profile companies using FoundationDB in production, I suggest checking out these two talks from the project's community conference, FoundationDB Summit: Wavefront/VMware[0], and Snowflake Computing[2].
There’s nothing inherently dishonest when a company emphasizes their open source strategy. Open source community building is as much about shipping code as it is leading people, and that requires you to be transparent about your intentions. I’ve interpreted opstrace’s release as just that.
I think the concern about neutral project governance is an important one. It’s early days, but from what I’ve seen it seems clear what is being sold vs what is open today. The fact that the project is released under the Apache v2 license means that folks are able to reuse, distribute, and sell the project as they wish — even fork it if they dislike the direction. That said, if governance is a priority for your use I’d definitely look to project in neutral software foundations like the Apache Software Foundation and CNCF.