I can sympathize with this:

>Yep, they took a feature that Apache httpd has had literally forever and put it behind a pay wall.

Charging for support is one thing, but this seems like it should be a basic feature.

And if I were running a server farm on FOSS software and then realized I'd need to cough up ($1350 * ~100) around $135k for the ability to disable obnoxious behavior, because the corporation arbitrarily decided that this particular feature (that most every other HTTP daemon worth a crap has had for ages) was the one that they're going to require you to pay for, I'd be a bit scandalized too, probably enough to write a blog post about how much it annoyed me.

It's perfectly reasonable to cringe at a $135K price tag. But if that's so onerous, why not spend a day compiling the source and setting it up for distribution on your servers? The answer is that you (or at least the hypothetical you) feel entitled to this software packaged how you want it with the features you want.

If you want to use Apache, use Apache. That's totally your right. Or you can fork NGINX and do whatever you want. It's even got a BSDish license to make that easy. You could even use the last version of the software that baked this feature into the standard distro. But you're using the official NGINX distro for a reason, and I don't see why the people who make it shouldn't demand a bunch of money for whatever that reason is.

To be clear, it's perfectly fine to say, "I don't think this is a good feature to put behind the paywall." I'm just balking at the whiny and entitled tone of the original post. "How dare they ask me to pay for the things I want!" If I were trying to monetize an open source project, per Jacques's comment above, this is exactly the kind of high-scale feature I'd target for that.

>To be clear, it's perfectly fine to say, "I don't think this is a good feature to put behind the paywall." I'm just balking at the whiny and entitled tone of the original post. "How dare they ask me to pay for the things I want!" If I were trying to monetize an open source project, per Jacques's comment above, this is exactly the kind of high-scale feature I'd target for that.

And you would be an anchor dragging the project down. You aren't considering the angle of external contributors. As someone who submits patches to open source projects, I would be pretty damn pissed if the project I spent hours/days/weeks learning the architecture of pulled some shit like this. Especially if they rejected a patch because the feature in the patch was too 'useful'. Disgusting.

How long do you think you will keep getting external contributors when they can't even use the full software and are afraid to put the work into patches because they might conflict with the 'enterprise offering'?

If you open source something and allow external contributors, you are going to receive this entitled tone when you pull these shenanigans.

> As someone who submits patches to open source projects, I would be pretty damn pissed if the project I spent hours/days/weeks learning the architecture of pulled some shit like this.

That's a good point, and I agree. But that's not the perspective being presented by this article, as far as I can tell.

I doubt it was an arbitrary decision. I think it was probably made carefully.

It's pretty simple actually: We don't have an HTTP server software budget. The expectation is that the tech team will choose the right tools for the job and ask for paid tools when we need them (eg. New Relic). NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.

> NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.

Then why the angst? This just makes me more confused about what your argument is.

What angst? That post reads more like a warning to others to me - after all, if they'd been aware of this issue from the start, they could've just used Apache from the beginning and avoided the hassle of having to migrate.

It's a sad reason to have to drop a piece of software and learn the config management of another. logging, really?

Perhaps in the next version it will be free for up to 20 concurrent connections and then $1 for each one after that.

>NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.

From the post:

>admittedly amazing software

It sounds, honestly, like you're never going to pay for OSS. That's fine if that's the way you want to do things, but to then write a post entitled "We should ditch NGINX" seems way over the top.

Why's it over the top for my company to ditch NGINX because it's missing a feature that Apache httpd provides?

Because you depend on a tool that you're not willing to pay for .. is it so difficult to see that you are being viewed as a bit of a scrooge, given that you will profit greatly from software you don't own and haven't paid for .. ?

First, there is no proof of how much profit comes from nginx in a stack with PHP so you can drop the 'profit greatly' line.

Second, the entire point of open source software and the FOSS movement is that you shouldn't be extorted for functionality. Do you harass people that file bug reports or submit requests for features to the Linux Kernel for not paying?

The entire point of FOSS is being able to have the source code of the software you use. Period. That's it.

The people who write the software can do whatever the hell they want, as can the people using the software, as long as they abide by the licence. These are the only stipulations. Even RMS supports the right of creators to sell software.

People who write FOSS software aren't required to be a charity...

> People who write FOSS software aren't required to be a charity...

I think this is a point so many users of FOSS miss. I'm an ardent supporter of FOSS, but I don't get to act entitled unless I'm paying someone (and probably not even then).

Are you or are you not running a business with FOSS? It was Free: so any USE of the software that you get out of it, was profitable. What part of "this is free, so anything you do with it is profitable" do you not agree with?

Second: extortion, really? Thats what you're calling this, in the same breath as admitting that you won't/can't/are unwilling to pay for software that is a key part of the production line?

The over-the-top part is where you use the stigma from your story (how nginx spurned you by choosing to charge you for a particular feature, which does not seem fair to you because you need it) to try to get everybody to stop using it, when the issue is simply that it does not suit YOUR needs.

I didn't get that at all from his post. "We really need to migrate off of NGINX" sounds like 'we' is his company, not the entire world.

Because you suggest everyone else should too.

> NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.

So use Apache or any other HTTPD. Problem solved.

If nginx has no features that set it off feom other servers you could simply switch to Apache which has the syslog feature. But for some reason you do not seem to do this, or am I mistaken?