Sad news, although it was obviously coming. Glad for Igor and others involved, but for me it is about time to start looking for alternatives.
Having stable revenue means the ability to spend 100% of the time working on the project (instead of it being a side project), and hire more full-time employees. It is possible that as a result both the pro and open-source versions improve faster than in an only-volunteer open-source project.
An alternative strategy to ensure it to do so in the future, could be to build a team of open source contributors to take charge of the further development of the project. As a user, I would prefer this, as it doesn't have the inherent conflicts of interests that a premium/free model has.
Not to mention: If you get value from Adaptive Multimedia Streaming then pay for it. Why should they necessarily provide you value for free?
I'm personally getting tired of folks who ride the coat tails of "open source" because they simply read it as "I don't have to pay" rather than getting behind the ethos of what it's actually about. I don't know about your specific situation to say this is the case here, just venting on a pile of comments that are poo-pooing the fact these folks want to make some money from the MASSIVE value they are providing the world.
Not everyone is on the world for money.
Well, they seem to have no stance on that - at least there's nothing on the page. So I tend to assume that pro features remain pro features.
Nobody is demanding that the nginx folks provide value for free. However, I see problems with their chosen business model. The separation of "open source" vs. "closed source" is ill defined. What happens for example if some other party implements a solution that provides the same functionality as a pro feature? Would they accept a PR for that and then provide it as part of the free version or would they just keep the pro-approved version and let the OS-version play catch up? Is it possible to patch the pro version as it is possible to patch the os version? Syslog logging requires source patches atm and it doesn't look like the patch will ever be accepted in the mainline. There's a legal question as well: From the changelog it seems as if other people contributed patches - the implied idea is that they provided patches to an OS project, did they sign a CLA that says they're transferring all rights to the nginx company?
Don't get me wrong: It's fair and square the authors want to make money of their project and they're certainly entitled to. I just see a bunch of issues cropping up.
As of writing, the Contributing page states: "License
Submitting changes implies granting project a permission to use it under an appropriate license."[0] "license" links to [1] which states (in part):
" * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions * are met: * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. " followed by standard liability disclaimer.
There may well be a problem agreeing what "appropriate" means. There's an argument that given the link, appropriate could mean a license that allows redistribution in the same way as the current license - which would raise interesting questions for redistributing the nginx plus version.
Certainly it's not a simple assignation of copyright to NGINX. I can easily imagine a lawyer having a heart-attack when reading the original conditions of submitting.
[0] http://nginx.org/en/docs/contributing_changes.html [1] http://nginx.org/LICENSE
What about the people who are fine with paying? Where can they get an open source version of Plus?
Pretty sure buying proprietary software is not part of the "ethos". Well, maybe of the open source ethos, but certainly not part of the Free Software one.
Amount of donations on this page: http://nginx.org/en/donation.html is really suck.
Says the .NET developer with empty github and bitbucket accounts. Meanwhile, there are those of us who live and breathe open source software, building industry-transforming businesses around open source software and contributing to the open source ecosystem. Don't even try to pretend you are anything other than an outside observer.
That argument applies to the software as a whole, not just to a particular feature, right? Isn't it just an argument against open source in general?
rather than getting behind the ethos of what it's actually about
What do you think is the ethos of what open source is actually about? I think part of it is indeed about sharing things with others for free, isn't it? If other parts of it are about the ability to see the code you're using, and make changes to it yourself -- you can't do that with the non-open-source part of this (or other) application either, right?
I don't have a definite opinion on the nginx model, whether or not it's good for the community, I don't really know. Certainly no developers are obligated to write open source ever, everyone can choose to write proprietary software whenever they want (and sometimes it's good for the community and sometimes it's not). But your argument is silly.
This wouldn't work. Paying corporations tend to be fairly conservative on the features they use, so it's not necessarily the new features that people are willing to pay for.
Mainline Nginx is still available while this seems to be a value-added product with a bunch of extras.