Honestly? I personally care very little whether or not something is open source at this point in time. Code bases have become so large that there’s little benefit to me other than self-hosting, and there are few things I care to self-host. The main argument I would make is that companies should, at the very least, open source everything before shuttering. If you’re going out of business, allow your former customers to maintain themselves what you’re no longer going to maintain yourself.
The real question is about contingency planning. Open source means you have the option to host yourself, but like you say that could be a lot of hassle, or more work than just switching to another closed source SaaS.
There are a few factors. If the space is competitive and there is an established API/protocol, it probably doesn't matter. Think Wordpress hosting, Email, renting VMs etc.
If it is open source and widely adopted - e.g. Linux, Redis, Kubernetes etc. then you know that thing is going to be supported forever. Although with the slight risk of a Terraform/Moq type issue.
But then you have open source and widely adopted with shifting APIs that generate more work - e.g. React.
Then you have these small companies that open source on YC with a 1-1 mapping between repo and corporation. If the corp goes under, the repo may go stale.
The decision as to the expected longevity and migration pain depends on a lot of factors. It is sort of intuitive. But open sourceness (and license freeness) is just one factor.
I never self host out of pure laziness. I like open source because I know (at least theoretically) that I can go in and fix something with a PR in a codebase I don’t “own”.
I've fixed like 2 things in projects I've used ever, I kinda suck as a contributor. But the indirect benefits I get from others being able to contribute to these projects is immense.
