Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious to see where this fork will go. The whole situation is a mess: - nginx is "open core", with some useful features in the proprietary version. - angie (a fork by several core devs) has a CLA, which sounds like a bait and switch waiting to happen and distro's won't package it - freenginx is at least open source. But who knows if it'll still be around by June.
I remember being surprised by the open core thing some years ago. I had been an Apache user for quite some time, and thought I'd take a look at the (at that point, a few years old) "new" shiny thing. I found that something as simple as LDAP authentication required a payed plugin; a free Apache module has been available for this for ages. That made nginx a non-starter for this particular use case. I wonder if the fork…
Unpaid Open Source developers tend to focus on interesting/cool core stuff and ignore all the stuff businesses care about (like LDAP authentication).