On the lack of ambiguity at the heart of 'Open Core'

As I've argued many times over the last few years, ambiguity is really useful… until it isn't. As soon as a concept becomes a dead metaphor it's in trouble. We may be witnessing this with the term 'Open Core':

The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially-produced open-source software. Coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008, the open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. — Wikipedia

Let's zoom out and define our terms, as the above definition lumps together 'Free Software' (actually 'Free Libre Open Source Software', or FLOSS) and 'Open Source Software' (or OSS). All OSS is FLOSS but not all FLOSS is OSS. The open source part is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition.

FLOSS is as much a political approach as it is a technological one. It's pretty hardcore, and represents a positive (as opposed to a negative) form of liberty. OSS focuses on the negative form of liberty, and the temptation can be to find loopholes in it for commercial gain. This has happened with a bunch of companies using the Open Core model.

The definition of Free Software specifically allows software to be sold by anyone, for as much as they want. Open Core attempts to limit who can make money from software — which seems to be at odds not only with Free Software, but OSS too.

The reason why people don't like the Open Core approach is that it doubles-down on the negative form of liberty, turning Open Source into a dead metaphor. It's extractive, and focused on making capitalists richer instead of the commons.