So we've got a company spending millions of dollars developing a piece of software, and then giving away all the source for free. And you think they should be forced to give you documentation on how to build it... why?
I mean, seriously the entitlement is astounding to me. OF COURSE they're going to make it difficult to build on your own, that's part of the monetization strategy. If you don't want to pay for it, and you also don't want to spend the time figuring out how to build it on your own, don't use it. But to act as if they owe you something is... ridiculous.
In the first place open source is a set of principals that is designed to inspire people to freely share with one another including the sweat of their brow in the form of direct contribution of work as opposed to cash.
Trying to make that sharing onerous is a violation of those principals and its not entitlement to point this out.
Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution.
So imagine it takes 1 person who is paid 120k a year a few weeks to produce a viable solution and documentation. The cost of this solution is about 2k and scales to infinity people.
In a universe where nobody communicates or collaborates I suppose you could imagine that everyone would pay 10k instead of paying 2k in labor for an officially supported solution perhaps in consideration for other value provided like tech support.
The problem is that this fails to consider the fact that someone might actually donate this labor for free to everyone negating the benefit of this particular moat.
It also creates a situation where someone might be inspired to put in the 2k worth of labor and charge 100 users $199 each and come out ahead.
Its certain that a number of players have earned money selling some sort of value add on top of open source software but the value add really needs to be something that you have a competitive advantage at providing not something trivial like a difficult build process.
>Its a astoundingly stupid monetization strategy. I'm going to assume that building the software may in fact be challenging but its a minuscule fraction of the difficulty of constructing the complete solution.
Really? Because that's exactly what Redhat does and they've been continually held up as the shining example of "open source works!" for several decades now...
I'm looking at the feature matrix and free is missing "Automated Updates via XenCenter" but the way it's worded I don't know if it's a change or not. Right now XenCenter automatically alerts me of updates and lets me run them from XenCenter...
- Dynamic Memory Control
- Xen Storage Motion
- Active Directory Integration
- Role Based Access Control
- High Availability
- GPU Pass-Through
- Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery)
- XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard
- Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts (existing larger pools will continue to work, but no new host joins will be permitted)
That's quite a list.