Why? Most enterprises, especially ones that aren't tech firms, are going to shell out for enterprise support even if there are no additional features. Crippling the community version doesn't necessarily help enterprise sales, it can reduce overall mindshare reducing enterprise traction or, worse yet, mean that a third-party downstream edition with richer open-source features becomes dominant and it's creator gets “your” enterprise support contracts.
i don't feel this to be true.
Also, an enterprise that's large would want some features that are irrelevant to a small shop. For example, single-sign-on integration with various providers.
Just think about the commercial success of SUSE Linux?
While partially true, this is overly reductive. Companies can and often do take actions that serve goals beyond "increase upcoming quarterly profits".
However, for profit companies are not here to do what’s “correct” they’re here to make money for its investors. If I had decision making abilities at Nginx I’d be conducting a comprehensive review of the free OSS offering and redacting the features and overall value with extreme prejudice.
Dropbox never paid because it COULD not pay. If you have an enterprise, paid version of your OSS product it has to be impossible for an enterprise to use it for free.