Financials are to blame. Selling a software release is a one-time payment. Selling a support subscription is recurring revenue. And if you make your software h

Financials are to blame. Selling a software release is a one-time payment. Selling a support subscription is recurring revenue. And if you make your software horrible enough to use without the support subscription, it is automatically immune to piracy. As a practical example, I don't know anyone who uses the free open source WildFly release. Instead, everyone purchases JBoss with support. It's widely known that you just need the paid support if you want your company to be online more than half of the day. And as if they knew what pain they would be causing, their microservice deployment approach was named "thorn-tail".