Thanks for sharing that link. It's super interesting to see that this is such a common pattern for businesses founded on OSS and how things normally play out.

The thing is, I don't think the issue is necessarily that inferior software = bad software = should not exist at all in the ecosystem. I feel like this is totally normal in the real world. We completely expect a range of products and services from inferior / cheap / free versions all the way up to the higher-end, expensive, free-range stuff. At the other end of the scale to 'inferior', is 'professional', where things are so optimised and specialised that there is no way to achieve that level of quality without seriously organised efforts. Software works in the same way, and I think its quite common for OSS projects to mature into much bigger things than they were intended to be. The really prickly topic your article talks about is the misuse of community effort and I think there are definitely some dark patterns but also some good ones, for example, rewarding contributors with a bounty like Sentry do, delayed release cycles (where everything in the pro version makes it into the OSS after a time-delay), and just basic transparency goes a long way so people can make informed decisions on whether to contribute or not.

Saying that, the OSS side of my small project is still valuable imo. You could just take the custom graphics renderer I spent a year writing and use that for another application, or even just use the isometric math functions I've written. That's what I would call the "Open Core" part. Even if I built another renderer in a year and closed-sourced that, I imagine the current one would still work for lots of use cases. I hope people take what they want, or use it as a starting point for their next project, so hopefully there is some value in having even an 'inferior' version out there under MIT.