They are probably looking for an ecosystem around the tool, like how github built on git.

How did Hashi corp make money (and an eventual billion dollar plus IPO!) developing open source tools like vagrant, consul and terraform...

Clearly the creator of ruff is going to expand from an open source tool into a company focusing on Python tooling and developer experience, services, etc. There is a market for stuff like that just based on pycharm and jet brains' success in the space alone.

HashiCorp made a $270 million loss last year, more than 50% of their revenue.

A lot of the money comes from Vault which is open source but only used by larger organizations that want support.

Vault namespacing also requires an enterprise license, so yeah if you're doing anything useful with Vault at scale, you're paying for it.

im sure they have a ton of ideas. my bet is that they might launch something in the CI/CD space. like building python packages/images fast, speeding up python testing or tackling something in ML inference.

Telemetry probably. Remember the telemetry in your terminal folks, on here? :cry:

But you might be able to do support contracts, like ansible. Tough road though.

Support contracts. Custom features built to order. Other commercial products based on the open-source libraries for parsing and analysis. Running a hosted service.

All this while remaining a team of 2-3, hopefully, with all company-running stuff minimized and outsourced.

Look at sentry

Sentry requires a platform to work, it's much easier to monetise. I'm not even sure it's possible to self-host?

I think we're going to see a shift in developers expectations towards the cost of their tools, as a side-effect of Copilot & co. If you already pay $100/mo in subscriptions for IDE, its plugins, and services it integrates with, then forking additional $5 for a linter doesn't look as absurd as it used to...