My interpretation is the opposite. MongoDB is clearly successful - they are a public company worth 16 billion dollars. And they proving the <i>success</i> of the open core business model.<p>For 99% of use cases, MongoDB is open source. You can see the code, you can make modifications, you can use it for free in your business, you can share your changes with others, you can integrate it into your products and services. Yeah, you can't use it if you're working at AWS, but for most people it's just fine.<p>For founders creating new open source companies, it's a great strategy to go the route of MongoDB. Start off open source and sell services. If you run into big enough problems with direct competitors using your own software, you can modify the license to exclude them.<p>This is far better than the status quo in, say, 2010, when the conventional wisdom was that if you're providing a service it shouldn't involve any open source at all.