Re:Nginx Plus
by FooBarWidget on Thursday August 22, 2013 @04:12AM
(#6255833)
This is exactly what happened to the Phusion Passenger application server (available as an addon for Nginx). Since the release of our (paid) Enterprise version we have a lot more resources at our disposal, and development of the open source version is now faster than ever before. Before releasing Enterprise we would make our living by doing consultancy but that slows down development even further. I'm very glad we decided to release an Enterprise version.
I think MySQL's three copyright owners (with a heavy emphasis on Oracle) gave open core a bad reputation. I like reading stories like this because I think it's important for there to be different business models for open source.
For what it's worth, this fork of nginx seems to be actively maintained, and appears to have viable sponsors:
https://github.com/alibaba/tengine
From my cursory reading, it actually adds some significant features. Perhaps it's worth considering.
It is possible that having a commercial offering, or a way to actually make money off nginx, will simply increase development time over all. Yes, some (most) of that will be towards the commercial product, but if they are making a reasonable amount of money off this, it may mean more time spent on the open version as well.
Also, with the nature of git it is possible for someone, or a group of someones, to fork nginx and run that fork as the 'new' open source nginx. What I mean is someone could fork the repo and if that one is getting enough attention from open source devs, it is possible that the fork would become the recognized version of nginx in the future. Not saying this is overly likely to happen, but it is possible.