second, I think, at least for me, what bugs me is the massive entitlement on display. God forbid devs who built an awesome piece of software get paid; instead, dude whinges on the internet that he might have to gasp patch and compile an rpm or fork out some money. The horrors!
On the surface yes, but consider the betrayal to all of the external contributors. Is the money going to them too? What about the people that wasted time proposing a patch that overlapped with this 'enterprise feature'. Open source is not a one-way street.
While I find the wholesale re-licensing of the codebase under a commercial license reprehensible, I agreed to that before committing code. That leaves me with one remedy, not committing additional code.
As a side note, this project had a basic FOSS version and an enterprise version with additional functionality. The only part of what they did that I took issue with is re-licensing the FOSS portion under a commercial license. Had they left the FOSS portion under the OSS license and simply added commercial code on top I would have 100% continued to commit patches.
I'm slightly less happy about the HTTP live streaming being in the Plus package, though. I've been playing around a lot with a media app using HLS and I can't even trial using nginx for it - not that I'd be too happy paying $1300 a year since I don't have a single user yet. I can see how they are trying to get money out of the big streaming companies, but it's not too friendly to the little guy.
Probably because you are not a systems engineer. Did you see what it resulted in here? Many of the people who have systems large enough to hit these issues will just work around it using the ramfs approach or by just dumping nginx. Either way you have a skilled engineer disappointed in your product.
Don't differentiate FOSS with paid on something that simple, especially something that has been supported by apache for almost a decade.
In this case, if they kept the same setup, I can see that it would be prohibitively expensive to pay for nginx plus on every single one of those VMs. I'm not sure of the nginx's license terms but if they count VMs as a separate server - probably a no go.
A better solution might be to turn all those VMs into application servers and put a big meaty nginx reverse proxy in front of them; that sounds like it would reduce the nginx bill but could be an awful lot of work. Then again, I presume they have automation, you'd hope so with hundreds of VMs...
My point is that it's likely not quite as simple as a grand a year, which would likely be a no-brainer if it was a site license.