Hmm, I'm a huge fan of sandstorm, but I have mixed feelings about this. I like sandstorm for its promise of easily running my own apps on my own server. My data is private and secure, yet I can still access it from my phone, laptop, library, etc. And a lot of really smart people are spending a lot of time making this happen, so in some ways I'm happy that they have a monetization strategy and strong motivation to keep at it!<p>On the other hand, until now, I had thought their monetization strategy was their oasis hosting platform. But now that I see this "sandstorm for business" strategy, it seems there's at least a little incentive to hamstring the non-business side to encourage people to purchase the feature key. The incentives aren't exactly aligned anymore. Before, I thought that any development that improved the platform would increase oasis use, and be good for them and good for private self hosters. Now, development on the "for business" features is much better for them with no benefit to people who haven't purchased the key, so I think there might be more developer focus on it.<p>On the <i>other</i> other hand, I can't think of a better way of going about it. Kudos to them for keeping it open source, being up front about the license check, and having the auto-update strategy. I like that if a business wants to stop paying, they're essentially locked into what they had paid for to that point, but haven't lost their data or access to the features they had. They just stopped paying for ongoing development so they don't get future features. That's pretty neat.<p>Overall, I don't see anything <i>wrong</i> about this approach, and a healthy sandstorm ecosystem and happy sandstorm devs is good for everyone, including those self-hosting the free version. It's just now I have a tinge of disappointment thinking of all this great development I was getting for free before, that now might be spent on enterprise features not available to me.