Comment by indymike

Self-hosting of software is what is changing. The open-core model is really built around maintaining installations of software on your own hardware (or virtual hardware). "Paying for pro" made sense in that world. With many things you would have installed and maintained on your own hardware moving to a SaaS model and PaaS model, there's really not much of an opportunity to "sell the pro version" outside large enterprises who are 10 years behind the curve. My latest startup owns zero servers. Costs scale on user count (for office stuff) or utilization. Licenses? I get calls from software vendors, and it's hard to even understand what they are selling because I don't buy licenses anymore.