I fully appreciate the need for the developers of nginx to make money and I can understand that moving to what essentially is open-core is probably the only way for them to actually make money out of nginx (the thing works so well that selling support contracts probably won't do).
They don't necessarily have to do "open core" though. How well something works isn't necessarily the measure of whether or not a customer would want a support contract. The real issue is "how important is this application (of nginx) and what's our tolerance for risk"? When customers buy the "enterprise" (or "supported" or "certified") version of an OSS project, they aren't necessarily buying it to get features they can't get otherwise... they're buying it to get the comfort and the risk management and the surety of knowing "if this breaks, there is somebody I can call that will be on the hook to provide a fix". Also, people think things like: "will I lose my job if a I deploy an unsupported OSS product in my enterprise and it breaks? But what if there's a vendor backing it?"
The nginx developers obviously have to make their own decisions based on their knowledge and research and feelings, but I will posit that for many OSS projects, there is no need to go "open core" in order to provide a commercial/paid version.
(Disclaimer: I'm a founder of an OSS enterprise software startup, and am pretty opinionated / biased on this topic).
They don't necessarily have to do "open core" though. How well something works isn't necessarily the measure of whether or not a customer would want a support contract. The real issue is "how important is this application (of nginx) and what's our tolerance for risk"? When customers buy the "enterprise" (or "supported" or "certified") version of an OSS project, they aren't necessarily buying it to get features they can't get otherwise... they're buying it to get the comfort and the risk management and the surety of knowing "if this breaks, there is somebody I can call that will be on the hook to provide a fix". Also, people think things like: "will I lose my job if a I deploy an unsupported OSS product in my enterprise and it breaks? But what if there's a vendor backing it?"
The nginx developers obviously have to make their own decisions based on their knowledge and research and feelings, but I will posit that for many OSS projects, there is no need to go "open core" in order to provide a commercial/paid version.
(Disclaimer: I'm a founder of an OSS enterprise software startup, and am pretty opinionated / biased on this topic).