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I am very agree with some options of this blog. As the maintainer of the open source distributed database TiDB https://github.com/pingcap/tidb, we also face the same problem of choice. We have a community version, an enterprise version(of course, we must sell it to our customers to earn money) and also a cloud service named TiDB cloud.
Seven years before, we started to build TiDB to solve MySQL sharding problem, yes, "I Don’t Want to Shard (MySQL)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32041656 too. At that time, we only had a community version of TiDB.
After we had developed TiDB for more that one year, we needed to consider earning money because we (PingCAP) are a company. So we built an enterprise version to sell to our customers. Unlike other companies do mostly, they separate the community and enterprise version a lot, there are even some killing features that only exist in the enterprise version. But we believe that all our customers, whether they pay for us or not, must get the benefits, nearly the same value from TiDB. So we decide to keep the same between the community and enterprise. The only difference for the enterprise version is that the version contains another two tiny features - audit log and IP white list. As far as I know, no community user asks us for these two feature util now.
Things were going well, and a few years later, we met the same dilemma for TiDB community version and TiDB cloud service. Of course, at this time, we still insist on that the TiDB must be open source, any improvement for the cloud will be contributed to the community version at first, then we deploy to our own service later. This mean anyone can deploy TiDB easily on the cloud too.
This is our open source decision. Thanks to this decision, our products are now increasingly well known, you can check the insights from https://ossinsight.io/analyze/pingcap/tidb/.