Open Core is a licensing and business model used by many commercial open source companies. The model relies on the creation of two products. One product is the open source core project typically given away freely and the other is a closed source paid for product likely built upon the open source project.
One of the things you'd expect from an active open source project is that the code base is likely to grow as more and more features are added. Does a lack of growth imply that there is a functionality ceiling imposed on open core software?
Open core refers to a business strategy employed by some commercial open source companies. The open core strategy is popular amongst companies within network management.
A real world example of what Tarus Balog from OpenNMS has been banging on about recently with his critique of open core or fauxpen source as Tarus calls it.
A product manager who has an open product and a closed product plainly has a decision to make over which features go into which product. Give too much away and the value add of the closed enterprise product is insufficient to warrant the licence fees. Put too many features into the enterprise product and the open source offering becomes useless.
