“The biggest reason why we don’t see support and services companies achieving hyper-growth is that they are uninvestable. Annual revenues are low and nonrecurring, and margins are tight. VCs are looking for 80%+ gross margins and hockey stick growth.”
Red Hat built a billion-dollar business selling support for software anyone can copy, and when CentOS gave RHEL away it hired the maintainers and later killed the project. Open Core Ventures, a fund that invests in open core companies, concludes the answer is open core. The argument is honest about the audience: VCs want 80 percent margins. Keeping the useful parts proprietary is how you get them, and the open source community pays the difference.