This is a topic that I find hard to articulate my exact concern. That’s why I haven’t replied directly, but this is probably not going to be any clearer (just more public 
)
I think there’s a different niche within the community - or a different dynamic perhaps - but different. And I’m not saying you’ve not considered them, or you’ve not got a plan up the sleeve - just that I’m worried about the potential impact on TinyCLR and the community. But again, just let me reiterate, I want the absolute best outcome for GHI. Without you guys, there is no us ( 
). I want you to be successful, and for TinyCLR OS 2.0 to be the next step in that success
Your 1) I agree with. Your commercial customers have been there for some time, and will continue to be there, because the commercial offering you have and the benefits that this gives them continues to be a reason to come back. I can’t gauge adoption, but yes networking restrictions certainly wouldn’t help adoption of TinyCLR there. Without these customers waiting in the wings, I can imagine the whole investment in TinyCLR is somewhat moot, so it’s an imperative that they are supported effectively. That’s what this program is here for and why it’s important that the insider program makes this a robust platform for them.
Your 2) partially agree. There is a “try it all” group, who will look at what many things have to offer. What I don’t agree with is your take on the open source / closed source aspect of history. The try-it-alls will have low “stickiness” to a particular technology and will not care too much for the change - they’re used to flipping and flopping and choosing a different tool each day of the week, so they’re unlikely to be concerned that all of a sudden one of the tools they had in their bag doesn’t continue past where it is today. As far as your ongoing customer base, any change for them is unlikely to disturb their future buying - they are unlikely to avoid buying a new product of GHIs just because their existing products were not able to be uplifted to the latest - if they want the new cool thing they will buy it; another tool in the bag. Open source or closed source, they don’t mind; they just want extra tools to throw at a problem should the need arise.
My new 2b) But there’s a “more committed” crowd who are sticky to a vendor/platform. They’re the ones who have invested their own time into helping increase the breadth of TinyCLR 1.0 reach through contributing ports to that (stm32f4/f7, disco boards etc) and have probably been playing a supporting role on the earlier netmf journey as well. These are the ones that I’m most concerned about. They are the ones who will see there’s no forward trajectory into 2.0 territory for them and their existing boards (even without saying open source, or closed source), and that they will think that their efforts in the past have all been for nothing or have diminished value. I am concerned (for GHI, not the 2b people necessarily) that they will decide to NOT invest further effort in TinyCLR when they have no way forward for their hardware they currently have ported TinyCLR 1.0 to, and abandon the platform. If you then layer on top of that, that they can’t even try to leverage your investment in 2.0 through reuse (or even bug fixes) to the 1.0 public codebase because its now private code, will they feel this as the end of the road? And really, when it comes down to it, I don’t want to see those people lost to the community (and defect to Arduino or something equally mundane 
).