One way I've seen recently is that you licence the code as AGPL, which effectively makes it unusable for corporates as they'd need to share their source code to use it. Then sell non-AGPL licences to fund the project. Of course bad actors can just ignore this too.
In terms of an exit, it may be harder yes, at the very least in the sense that you would need to find buyers who understand the why & how of the business model. Not impossible, but outside of tech circles it's not like everyone knows how OSS works.
That being said, you don't have to have it open source in order to offer self-hosting options; it's just convenient. There are plenty of paid developer tools in certain niches that give you licence keys & install instructions on how to do it yourself. Mailcoach is a great example - a 1-year licence costs a little bit more than using their SaaS option at low scale, but if you use it a lot the self-hosting makes sense.
One way I've seen recently is that you licence the code as AGPL, which effectively makes it unusable for corporates as they'd need to share their source code to use it. Then sell non-AGPL licences to fund the project. Of course bad actors can just ignore this too.
In terms of an exit, it may be harder yes, at the very least in the sense that you would need to find buyers who understand the why & how of the business model. Not impossible, but outside of tech circles it's not like everyone knows how OSS works.
That being said, you don't have to have it open source in order to offer self-hosting options; it's just convenient. There are plenty of paid developer tools in certain niches that give you licence keys & install instructions on how to do it yourself. Mailcoach is a great example - a 1-year licence costs a little bit more than using their SaaS option at low scale, but if you use it a lot the self-hosting makes sense.