I hope I'm in the right place to ask that.

I have a question regarding the practice of open-sourcing a proprietary library that we built and use at work. The licence will probably be MIT. I like the idea, but here comes the unusual part : I have been tasked to remove some of the most advanced features. Those will remain on our servers, available as a service. We will open-source the (JavaScript in case it is of interest) library, along with a minimal associated server code.

I am not asking a question about the technical problems (I imagine we will have to maintain and synchronize somehow different repositories, maybe with incompatible pull requests, but this for stack overflow).

What I would like to know is:

• How that would be perceived by the community at large ? Does it risk killing the eventual interest in this library?

• I don't personally know of any library that works like that. I'm pretty sure it is possible however, but any evidence of such a library is welcome (successful if possible). That's also because I'd like to see how they present it.

• More importantly, what could be the rationale for/against it? I'm not sure I understand the consequences of doing it so.