The reality is that licenses must be restricted because people cheat, steal and pirate. Hate them instead. Besides $49 is dirt-cheap for what it is, especially considering it covers all future versions.
Offtopic.
Mind sharing what are you doing with thousands of pi's ? Thanks
so you've spent 1000s * $49 for the license?
Would it? For the sake of discussion, I'll assume "thousands of raspberry pi's" = 2,000 RBpis, or something around $10,000 in license fees.
I don't know anything about either project beyond the links shared by you and the root comment, but based on the information at each link and the assumption of $10,000 spend:
I would choose the one time cost of VirtualHere's purpetual update license and release cadence over a some short dev for hire contract to write some unmaintained wrapper code around a sourceforge library that hasn't been been touched in over a decade.
1. You are paying a developer that works 100% on that, year after year, and not a hire that won't be there when something goes wrong in the future after an OS update, new hardware, anything. This is basically your argument. Let me add:
2. In some parts of the world far away from SV but still in the West, $100k are about two years of gross developer salary, not what the developer actually gets at the end of the month. Point 1 still holds. Where it's 10 years of salary maybe companies could be tempted by a custom solution.
3. You are giving $49 per server to that developer but you are probably getting more per server from your customers. If you have thousands of servers you probably have a viable business, so that's just yet another cost of doing business.
If anything it’s on windows for not having a way to allow just one unsigned driver.