But when I read about funding, about founding a real corporation and everything else that's going on, I'm afraid that at one point, nginx will do a MySQL and become open-core.
It's not that I'm not willing to pay for software in general, but I would love to have flexibility when I'm chosing my infrastructure. If the need for an additional server arises, I want to just start it and not matter about buying licenses and entering keys.
This is one of the main reasons, I prefer my infrastructure to be open source.
"But, open-core is also open source", you might say, but none of these projects ever end up getting a good community behind them. Many talented people would not sign a CLA and they would not want to invest their time into something that's "tainted" by a "better" enterprise edition.
Also, often times, submitted patches would not get accepted because the submitted feature is conflicting with an enterprise-feature - maybe even just one that's planned for somewhere in the future.
So in the end most of these open-core projects are exclusively developed by the same people who do the enterprise version and have a vested interest in selling enterprise licenses, degrading the "open" edition to nothing more than a trial version.
I would hate to see this happen to nginx. Not because there are no open alternatives (there are), but because nginx is elegant, fun to work with, fast and, above all, stable.
Let's hope that a pure support-based revenue model is going to work out for them.
(edit: nginx is released under a very liberal license, so it's entirely thinkable that, nginx would be OpenSSH'd: OpenSSH AFAIR started as a fork of the last Free version of ssh. And now just look where OpenSSH stands compared to non-free ssh)