Ricky_CheesyChips

First off: It's worth saying I have NO INTEREST in doing this. I don't want to give the impression I'm trying to be malicious here, I do like the product and think it's worth paying for, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting my essay-length analysis yesterday, I would have just moved to something else. Unraid keys are not transferrable, by policy, sure, but there's a variety of grey market key resellers that already do this with a variety of online accounts, often hosted in countries that don't really have a legal framework that cares whether this is in direct contravention to vendor policies. There's no technical limitation preventing anyone from buying current-day licenses en masse to auction off on any one of these sites. We're not even talking dark web or anything, I can find a number of sites on google right now where I could buy a steam account preloaded with games. Grey market/black market doesn't care about the policy, it just cares about money.

As a relative newcomer to unraid, I see the tremendous value it offers, but I do have to admit that I would have been turned off by a recurring pricing model and would not have been as eager to jump in to this ecosystem if this were on the radar. This is already paid software in a market against free options (OMV, TrueNas) so I don't believe you're going to win additional users over on this. You're also getting very biased feedback on this forum because the only people who are here largely already own a license, so they don't have a stake in this, as they'll be grandfathered (until this changes, which it probably will, let's face it, every time this happens, it comes to a point where the grandfathered tier ends too) This is why the coverage on reddit is less favorable. These are potential unraid subscribers saying "I don't think this works for me" - these are the voices we need to listen to, because, guess what, if you can't bring in the new subscribers to drive your cash flow issues, it'll be even sooner that you need to cannibalize your grandfather tier to meet the payroll demands. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand that folks need to get paid and that a reliable revenue stream is a necessity, I don't hold this against you, but I do feel very conflicted about how you're choosing to go about implementing this, because there is a solid lack of information on whether security/bug fix/data loss updates will be applied for new users once this licensing goes through. Given that we've only recently discoved a long-standing major zfs bug in the last few months, the idea that extremely critical data loss vulnerabilities will go unpatched for users after a year is a disappointing choice, not a small "detail" as it's been expressed in prior posts. I can guarantee you that once the licensing changes solidify, that the first time there's a major vulnerability, it will blow up everywhere, get carried by all the tech media, flood the support forums - that will eliminate any goodwill that would drive new butts into seats. If the new licensing scheme doesn't readily attract users, the change is all for naught. I'm monitoring this cautiously, but I'd like to strongly recommend that you clarify if security, bugfix and data loss updates are pushed for folks without a subscription. I can tell you now that if another long-standing ZFS bug comes out at a point in the future, and there's an entire class of unraid users who need to re-up/pay to fix it (or worse yet, are left to feel like they have to pay to get support to recover data), they will loudly move to a different product, community support will eventually falter and this will just be another product that was good at one time. Also, I'm curious how much of a cash inflow you've seen now that there's a potential secondary market of folks buying basic keys en-masse to resell/hold their spot in the legacy tier as it will always be a better product than what you're providing now. By fudging this announcement, you've basically just designed a black market resale scheme for years to come. This is a problematic launch and a problematic idea, albeit for a good cause. Seriously disappointed.