Clearly, it makes sense on the "sellers" side to make it into a service - the article pretty much conceded to that. However, this issue is also created by the "buyers" side as well. To give a concrete example - prometheus is an open source alternative for observability. But if you have a small team and want to release early, you will still go to DataDogs, and splunks of the world. Of course, you can say but that's fine. But there are others that could have been a library. Yes, but libraries also come with a maintenance overhead (security, patches, etc.).