I'm just daydreaming here, completely understand they have a business to run and they probably thought long and hard about which features to put into which license. No criticism intended, just something that eventually might catch up on them if another http server/proxy can offer everything that nginx does plus the missing items.

They’re owned by F5, so selling support and services.

it is really, really hard to sell Nginx. their conversion rate is about 0%. they've tried really hard to so, but nobody would buy it.

I thought they were making decent revenue now?

because they sell Plus.

I know of companies that buy Plus just for the support and don't even use the Plus features.

Oh, I thought their only product was plus and I didn't realize that the comment was referring to something else! Which proves the point the comment was making very well!! So from what I understand, they also sell regular ngnix support

What support and services do you actually need though. This would create a perverse incentive to make the software more complex and unreliable and then selling the resources to fix it for you.

Vs just actually selling the software and having it work flawlessly with minimal work.

Have you ever worked in a large enterprise? They always want support for stuff like this.

Always

The way that Red Hat and Nextcloud do.

RedHat provided an entire platform that you pay support for... including supporting nginx. How can nginx (the company) replicate the same thing?

Pay for the features you want. You will be better off for it. Expecting every company to follow the RedHat model is unsustainable.