I'm happy for those companies that become commercially viable through pure open source - and those are some great examples - although they're not financially viable on their own:
- Firefox's primary income stream is embedding Google search.
- Linux is funded primarily through companies like Canonical and RedHat, which charge for premium features.
I'm sceptical that if either of those examples were to launch today, that they'd survive using the same strategies they used years ago. I'd wager that if Canonical launched today, it'd be as Open Core, which isn't far off what it's actual business model is.
However, those are great examples of companies whose primary focus is in shipping "The Thing", and finding a way to build a business around it. That's far better than making "The Thing" a side-hustle, which is what the React example was advocating.
How is "Be a company that harvests personal data for profit, and publishes a javascript library on the side" a good model?
And, how is it better than:
"We build this thing. It's all we do. Here's the source. If you use some features, you gotta give us money?"