>I don’t blame NGINX for wanting money in exchange for what is admittedly amazing software. I just don’t want any part of it.
Why not? You're using this awesome software whose value you appreciate and which is, you admit, open source. It's just not convenient enough for you. So why can't you pony up the money for your huge, high-traffic website?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Then why the angst? This just makes me more confused about what your argument is.
Perhaps in the next version it will be free for up to 20 concurrent connections and then $1 for each one after that.
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.
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?
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 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...
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).
So use Apache or any other HTTPD. Problem solved.