The community does not apply one business model to every project. Infrastructure benefits from verifiability, self-hosting, and open participation. A deeply integrated desktop experience needs sustained investment and reliable revenue.
“Better products often begin by removing an answer that looked essential.”
When considering open source, a working group answers three questions in public: do users need long-term control of their data; would community extension materially improve the product; and can the project remain maintained without constant sales pressure?
That is why TinyRelay is MIT licensed, Fieldnotes is planned as open core, and LumaFlow is proprietary with an export covenant. These are different maintenance contracts, not conflicting values.
This note reflects the judgment at publication. The product will keep changing, and new evidence may overturn the conclusion.