[goodweeds]

PuppetLabshas found that #1, being a services company, really sucks. There's less of an impetus to do a good job at maintaining your community since you're directly competing with them. The realization that their documentation is somewhat sub-par, and that they haven't really built the community that Chef has is why they're shifting to being a products company with their hosted offerings.

Perhaps Nginx can learn from that, and maybe build out some hosted products, like selling self-scaling nginx ami clusters on ec2.

Webservers are a hard business to make money in. Look at Zed Shaw, he built the app server that made Twitter possible, and I'm quite sure he never saw a dime out of it, though it increased his reputation. Likewise Igor hasn't seen money out of nginx yet, but he's built software that also helps enable hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions per year of business. He deserves the opportunity to profit on the technology he's shared with the world for free.