Comment by auggierose

> Well, what's idiotic is expecting collab on a source-available project.

Depends on what you understand by "collab". That can be a business partnership where actual money is exchanged. It is called capitalism, and I leave it up to you to judge how idiotic it is.

> Open source software companies need to come to grips with that uncomfortable truth

Again, I don't know many open-source software companies. I am currently using the Monaco Editor for a project, it is great open-source software, published by Microsoft. I wouldn't call Microsoft an open-source software company, though. Which is my point.

I don't think a small software company can gain much these days by making their software open-source. Just put it behind an SaaS, with a generous free tier (free as in beer) to attract users. Make (some part of) it source-available, so that people can experiment with your software and interface with it, for example for writing plugins (that would be the collab part). Think really hard about whether to actually open-source anything, and if it is worth it. When in doubt, consider AGPL.