@sleepawalker.white I think that Gabriel did respond (or (had) others in the company (reply) for him). One of those was that hint on the sponsorships and I only just found this post.
In summary, writing as a community member and ‘willing-to-pay’ >15k user, I don’t hold much against RC for going taking path. You could even say that they are vary much softening the blow by announcing it a year in advance and actually having the promised ‘packages’ from back than in place. Using Github is a nice way IMHO, it’s readily accessible for most that way and a clear communication of ‘using open source’ (the right way).
What isn’t right is what Andreas is talking about in his post (just above yours). If those numbers are right something is wrong and a dearly apologetical post and personal mail should be in order.
In terms of pressing - I see multiple RC-members toning down on the ‘forced/upsales ent/pro’, though a sales-rep wouldn’t be worth his wages if he didn’t try to a) understand and b) convince a lead to go for a better package. We can all shout out ‘we wanted free, but willing to pay’ but we should also duly understand that RC wants to understand why we want to host things ourselves (which, in all honesty you’d have to agree, can be far more expensive). Let’s say for some sports team (see other thread) you host RC yourself and have a couple dozen participants - if you get hit by COVID and unfortunately hospitalized, that community is without their precious RC. Suddenly having the cloud-chat available makes sense.
For that same sports team $20(@saas) would still be way to much, and I’m sure the RC-reps wouldn’t try to squeeze there but you never know what special things they are willing to provide and it might be a better deal. Would they still start the conversation hoping to get a 200-person deal at ent? Sure! Wouldn’t you? But if they know the numbers they might be able to create a package that is affordable to the team.
So are you wrong?
- Well, in communication they surely could improve. Still waiting for a date (about 19 days now) so I can turn PNs on again (or have my users live without them).
- In making money, yes, open source isn’t free - even if it is. I’m a small contributor to Home Assistant and as such even got an additional pieace of hardware from a local store to ‘include it’. If I weigh the bought and free product (couple hunderd euros) against the time spend on getting it shared and up to date (even though we’re now a 3 man team), it’s never going to match up. But for me it’s a hobby, I improve my coding skills, and it makes people happy. For RC it’s their bread-and-butter, at some point in time they need to get something out of it
- Are they exaggerating the PN costs? They might, we don’t know (neither should we probably). The proposal made in the other thread about ‘couple of $ per month’ is what they offer through Github. If their top 20% is checkout out at 60k PN/month and they need to support a neatly load-balanced setup of servers, that might cost an additional dev/ops resource just keeping that in check, personnel still is a costly thing (especially if that person can’t work on monetized projects/functionality that enterprise users are paying for to implement).
All in all, would I rather see a free or better way to implement PNs - yes. Am I looking forward to a sales-rep pitch - no, who would? Is Open Source free - no, it never was, nor will be - it’s a way of improving your own code and offer others the ability to chip in. Am I looking, as you, for a decent way to pay for a service someone else is spending money on - you bet, and (keeping in mind Andreas’ story) it should be for the right amount of PNs.