It is a little late for a response to this question but I just had another thought.

Maybe a local Uber-like business. One that only servers one city.

Some to do with cabinets, like kitchen cabinets. There are a lot of CNC machines around that are not being used to there full potential. A business set up to let a handy man doing work around town or a home DIYer could walk into a businesses, give some dimensions for some cabinets, and walk out a couple hours later with all the parts to put the cabinets together could do well.

A company providing a service might turn to open source a software project if they do not want to turn into a software company. If I understand correctly MySQL AB was a company that developed an open source DB but made money selling support and training (and also sold a non open version of MySQL). The company later sold for $1 billion, so there must have been some benefit.

Interesting, is it fair to say that for enterprise customers, the bulk of the cost comes in the form of support & training?

I've seen a CRM company that sold their software for 100k/year but the actual software license is only like 20% or less and the remaining 80% was training and support.

So in this case letting go the license fee in return for marketing to adopters who now will turn to you for help.

Yes.

Did you hear anything?

I think (of course just an uneducated guess) things were going poorly from the beginning. It just looked slower than usual. Also, it looked like some of the engine exhaust was in places it should not have been several seconds before the "anomaly".

I hope they get everything figured out and get back on track soon. Best wished.

Do you think you might be having a hindsight bias?

No, I really thought that. I also thought, all sorts of things so I am not claiming to have some sort of predictive powers. It could easily be camera angles and my expectation of seeing the thing zoom off the pad.

Just saw this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24cZYMsdrq0) video. It looks like trouble started near the top of the rocket. Also, heard the Air Force Terminated the flight.

Anyway, we will see.

I noticed that too, seemed slow clearing the tower, I thought it was mo imagination, or the camera angle.

I find all SpaceX launches to be "slow" compared to (some) other launches. But this is mostly due to the Falcon not having any solid rocket motors: These produce a massive amount of thrust (far higher than liquid engines) and thus a high accelerating force right from the beginning. You can see that in e.g. Shuttle launches or the recent Vega launch (all solid motor), compare them to other liquid-only rocket motor launches.

Same here, but they said the liftoff was nominal so I'm guessing it's either imagination or camera angle. This stuff is really hard to judge from video.

Hate to see it also. It think things were going bad right from the beginning though (a completely uneducated guess).