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Comment by venus | Hacker News Reader

"NGINX Plus Standard" costs $1,350 annual subscription per server. It sounds like this company has a pretty strange setup, running "hundreds of VMs", presumably all running nginx, and it's the combined impact of those VM logging writes that are so burdening the NetApp devices.

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.

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first, that price is almost certainly negotiable, particularly if you call and say "i'm running a ton of light vms for some strange reason"

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!

>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.

So, I found myself in a similar position recently with a technically FOSS project. The patches I was submitting were being re-licensed under a commercial license and sold to enterprise customers. I had to sign contributors agreement before sending patches and after the fact I found myself having a philosophical issue with them selling my work. As a consequence, I stopped submitting patches to the main project and instead maintain my own patch repo now.

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 am not disagreeing that in this specific case that the licence structure might lead to unhappy arithmetic. I do however stand by my original point that syslog support is an excellent cleavage point to segment the customer base.

Yeah, I do agree with that.

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.

Segmentation is a lossy function, unfortunately. If you try too hard to fit the price/feature curve by creating too many segments, you wind up with nonsense like Windows Home Professional Premium Plus Ultimate Edition.

FYI, you might want to try nginx-rtmp-module (https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module); HLS support is one of its advertised features. I've been using it for RTMP and it's been working flawlessly.

>I do however stand by my original point that syslog support is an excellent cleavage point to segment the customer base.

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.

At these volumes, nobody really would multiply one server price tag per amount of VMs. That's when people negotiate. So 135k price tag is probably purely imagined.

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