[dmicher]

There are different paths companies take. Some buy and it really works for them and their business, since overhead is small and everything just works. The other set of companies have more sophisticated requirements: when they want to have full control on what is going on, understand what the code is doing to better optimize everything else around it, faster shipping cycles and being able to implement what you want with out waiting for the next shipping cycle with commercial software, community and knowledge base around it etc.

[rogerdonut]

> when they want to have full control on what is going on, understand what the code is doing to better optimize everything else around it, faster shipping cycles and being able to implement what you want with out waiting for the next shipping cycle with commercial software, community and knowledge base around it etc.

I'm a bit confused by this - I work for HAProxy Technologies and we do have an enterprise product. Many of our customers contribute code directly into the community and we backport those features into the latest enterprise stable version. This means they do not have to wait until the next shipping cycle to take advantage of a new feature. There's also a large community & knowledge base around HAProxy.

Your reasoning may be right when dealing with "closed source enterprise software" but it doesn't line up when we start talking about open source/open core.

[dmicher]

Shipping cycle is one of the reasons mentioned. And as you can imaging, unfortunately, contributing to Nginx open source is not an easy thing (but they have a great product for sure). If HAProxy is different in terms of contributions - it is great!

[FireBeyond]

What stops them buying commercial licenses for Nginx and then using the OSS version? They're not obligated to, certainly, but I hardly think Nginx would say "you must use only the commercial version".