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by svengrunner2049 1084 days ago
It is a good product, so we're tying to put our org in a position to pay for it. But I really don't like this model of intentionally frustrating or obfuscating whether it is open source or not, or not listing/hiding what is or isn't in enterprise vs OSS versions. For example, the fact that starting off open source (assuming you succeeded running the maze of figuring out how to run it), explicitly blocked the path to goto enterprise is a shame, and seems like a bit of a missed business opportunity.

We'll probably see more of these faux OSS projects who hoped for some community/network effect from being OSS to translate into either strong donations or considerable uptake of their enterprise/cloud/managed versions go this route.

To be clear, fully support charging for and paying for SaaS. Would just like be able to know what is in front of me when making build/buy decisions.

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I've tried finding out if they still offer the free tier now that the OSS is gone, because one of their employees mentioned it on Github, but failed to find anything. I can see they have a free trial. Their own website is full of broken links and contradicting information due to the frequent licensing/product changes.

I've even found a page still mentioning the OSS version and telling you how easy it is to fire it up.

They shot themselves in the foot majorly on this one.

When you realize that one of your products isn’t being heavily used and is OSS, you don’t close source it, you keep it open!

This shows that the value add of the paid product is actually worth it to customers.

Now?

Not so much.