Being able to self host means you control your infra, so that's a very good property of the tools you use and should probably be a criterion for choosing what you use, even if you don't use the capability yourself. The ability to self-host increases the chances there's something to migrate your data in and out.
The ability to self host also doesn't prevent someone, including the original developers, to also proving hosted services.
And since the presented tool is open source, it's also possible for another company to provide hosting.
All those things are true, but there’s risk associated with going with such a new project with no current monetisation path (especially for something that my colleagues might be putting information into that we might need to access/modify for many years or even indefinitely).
> All those things are true, but there’s risk associated with going with such a new project with no current monetisation path (especially for something that my colleagues might be putting information into that we might need to access/modify for many years or even indefinitely).
Right, though that's orthogonal to the self-hosting aspect.
> Open source isn’t a business model.
Indeed but you can build a solid business model around open source. What do you mean?
The ability to self host also doesn't prevent someone, including the original developers, to also proving hosted services.
And since the presented tool is open source, it's also possible for another company to provide hosting.