Let’s say you need a feature in nginx. You can either pay for an nginx plus license, or fork the oss nginx and develop the feature in-house. Many people assume

Let’s say you need a feature in nginx. You can either pay for an nginx plus license, or fork the oss nginx and develop the feature in-house. Many people assume that developing it in-house is a one-time cost. However, in my experience, code is not an asset but a liability for which you will have to pay interest in the form of maintenance. More specifically, in this case there will most likely need to be adjustments made to the in-house extension as the oss nginx version it was built on top is being updated over the years. My point here is that you should probably treat in-house code as a recurring cost, because in practice it usually is. The question then becomes which recurring cost is higher: The license or the in-house maintenance?