alt Hacker NewsStartups fail because of a lack of adoption far more often than by any other reason, including competitive and monetisation factors.
If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.
But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.
This is not necessarily true. Wrong monetization can be the killing blow. Market can change and your business model which used to work can suddenly fall apart. A recent example for business model change is Tailwind where traffic to their open-source docs plummeted and suddenly not enough people are upgrading to their commercial licenses.
Startups die for a variety of reasons, even if products are popular and loved.