Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.
There’s no 100% indicator, but presence/non-presence of a contributor license agreement that gives them the rights to distribute under any license is the best one I’ve found. Corporate backed FOSS where they want the option to turn into non-FOSS “just in case” means that will inevitably happen after people are locked in. Best place to look for one is the project’s documentation on how to contribute/how to send pull requests.
Stuff licensed under BSD/MIT style permissive licenses don’t need a CLA to go proprietary, but the ones that do tend to have a CLA anyway.
“CLAs” that are just an sign-off (developer certificate of origin like used by the kernel) are fine and are also treated as a CLA every so often, but the moment you see anything about giving one specific company a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license” or the like, run for the hills.