> If it doesn't work well for such high profile names

What, exactly, doesn't work well? Almost anybody knows of Redis and ElasticSearch, many of the ideas they implement spread in the ecosystem and everyone can still use the old versions as the FOSS they were made as.

If you're talking about that they were unable to build a for-profit on top of giving software away for free without any concrete plans on how to actually make money, yeah, that might not have been sustainable. But that makes it sound like their business plans were what didn't work, the Open Source part seems to have worked out just fine for what the purpose is, to give away software for free.