> I'm not sure what "complete feature-set" means—the free offering already seems pretty complete to me, though obviously my use case is not very demanding.
I worded that part a bit oddly (sorry, not a native speaker), I meant that one already gets all features, as we don't do any feature gating or the like. I.e., you can use all features of the software with or without subscription, the latter only provides extra services.
> Still, I wonder how many homelab users would be willing to pay something like $10-20/yr (or maybe a one-time license purchase) just to make the nag dialog at login go away.
Actually the "stick" part of the carrots and stick design is just as important for enterprise users, as surprisingly a significant amount of enterprise user do not care of not getting any software updates ("it's enterprise, it just needs to magically work, even for new unforeseen events!11!!1"), and the subscriptions and enterprise repo existed before the nag, I cannot share all details, but you will have to believe me that it made a big difference. It also showed that a lot of companies are willing to pay for projects supporting their infrastructure, but they need to be made aware of the possibility quite actively.
But yeah, I can understand the opinions of the home lab community here, but I also hope that I could convey that the current system was carefully optimized over many years for our business case, and that means, that it can pay a (nowadays not so small amount of) developers salaries to extend, maintain and support the growing amounts of Proxmox projects.
If anybody that stumbles over this still does not believe in the necessity of the system, or know how it will be better if we do XYZ (how, if you have zero insights in our data and obviously do not run your own company doing this?), I just have to be blunt and recommend just using an alternative, for PVE et al. the single nag on login is the price you pay to get a full-blown cluster & hyper-visor stack.
> or maybe a one-time license purchase
I feel already like some FLOSS evangelist, but that's something I just have to correct: we sell no licenses at all, our projects are, and will stay, AGPLv3 licensed. And w.r.t. the same question for a life-time subscription with a one-time fee, not planned, reasons: see above.
btw. thanks for the discussion, most often I read this more in the demanding voice, which is hard to stay polite when responding – that wasn't the case at all here.
We don´t have a single node without a license. Strange
