Hi @smschumacher
It's a good question and there's no easy answer.
First, Xen Orchestra is not Open Core: you have all XO features from the sources, so it's not true to say "you want premium feature you need to pay". We are talking about support and some tools outside XO itself.
There's no problem for individuals using from the sources, and enjoy everything for free. Note that Vates made 99,99% of the code base, it's not a dev community effort. So we decided to put it for free and Open Source, because we believe in that fair model. That's why we also decided to do XCP-ng.
But what about no companies using XOA and support? How could we pay the 6 full time devs to work on it? So this is a kind of way to remind corporate usage that's NOT safe to use it without support. In a ideal world, this won't have to be displayed. But don't be naive, the reality is often harsh.
How could we detect that your source install is for your home lab or if you are a company?
Also the donation would be even more problematic: companies will prefer to do that instead of paying for support. This would put us at risk. Also remember that for now XOA subscriptions are also paying for XCP-ng development. We aren't a big company, and we rely exclusively on XOA/XCP-ng support revenue, that's it. And the market isn't that huge (cheaper plans would be even close to break-even): to go cheap you need the numbers, and they aren't here.
There is a reason for those messages, it's not made to bother you, it's made to bother corporate users who want to use it from the sources and just take support for 1 month when they got a problem (you know, as if you took an insurance for your car just after crashing it).
I agree it's a delicate balance, and it's hard to find the sweet spot. Are you really in pain to see those messages, knowing it might help us to get corporate users to decide to take support because their boss saw the warning?
Anyway, suggestions welcome, I'm always open to hear feedback!
edit: talking about oVirt, you know it's the RHEL "community version" right? Why companies are paying for RHEL? Because of the brand name. It's Redhat. Well, even IBM now. We aren't that kind of fish.
