> Open core companies tend to lean into "we'll figure out how to monetize later" which inherently means it's harder to trust what they say now because their incentives are guaranteed to shift towards monetization eventually.
How is this guaranteed? If the OSS product is truly core to the business, the incentive will always be to make it as best as possible, which will benefit both OSS users and commercial customers.
This "shift towards monetization" either doesn't happen, or if it does, has no negative effect for OSS users, who will only benefit from the company having more resources to invest in growing the team, more frequent updates, better support, etc.
I can name countless products that have done this right, yet can't think of any that haven't. Can you mention some? Your article lists a few along with their funding data, as if this is somehow inherently a bad thing.
Chances are that companies that did this wrongly had much larger problems, and took advantage of their users in other ways as well. This isn't an issue with the open core model, but with these companies.
> The other models bake in monetization from the start, so you know what you're getting into when you start using the product.
The thing is that none of the alternatives you propose have any benefits for the user. They're either not free software (source available), the OSS component is not standalone and is intrinsically tied to a proprietary service, which serves more like a commercial hook, or the OSS components are noncritical to the business, which doesn't incentivize maintenance.
This is a very opportunistic view of OSS, and is no better than companies that do open core wrongly.