Sadly, it would probably be as hard to maintain as an opensource version. We really want to have access to the code to make sure we can fix, troubleshoot it, understand it fast...

Things that may've help:

-- Configuration definition (e.g. protobufs.)

-- More focus on observability: error metrics (instead of logs), tracing, etc.

-- gRPC control plane.

-- C++ module development SDK.

-- (ideally) bazel.

Some dataplane features like gRPC JSON transcoding, gRPC-Web, and http/2 to backends.

Don't any of the major commercial open source vendors offer custom terms to give access to the commercial source? I'd imagine they'd contemplate it for big deals. Seems like one of the only ways to keep some of these sophisticated customers onboard.

open source argument is valid -- most software enterprise vendors do provide source code access (under NDA.) The rest of the arguments stand though: as it is right now, it way more developer/operator friendly to use Envoy in our production.

The price is really insane for Nginx commercial.

As an Enterprise software vendor myself, I can assure you: everything is negotiable at Dropbox’s scale including very deep discounts.

About $2000 per host.