Sandstorm for Work Beta: LDAP, SAML, Organization Management
Hmm, I&#x27;m a huge fan of sandstorm, but I have mixed feelings about this. I like sandstorm for its promise of easily running my own apps on my own server. My data is private and secure, yet I can still access it from my phone, laptop, library, etc. And a lot of really smart people are spending a lot of time making this happen, so in some ways I&#x27;m happy that they have a monetization strategy and strong motivation to keep at it!<p>On the other hand, until now, I had thought their monetization strategy was their oasis hosting platform. But now that I see this &quot;sandstorm for business&quot; strategy, it seems there&#x27;s at least a little incentive to hamstring the non-business side to encourage people to purchase the feature key. The incentives aren&#x27;t exactly aligned anymore. Before, I thought that any development that improved the platform would increase oasis use, and be good for them and good for private self hosters. Now, development on the &quot;for business&quot; features is much better for them with no benefit to people who haven&#x27;t purchased the key, so I think there might be more developer focus on it.<p>On the <i>other</i> other hand, I can&#x27;t think of a better way of going about it. Kudos to them for keeping it open source, being up front about the license check, and having the auto-update strategy. I like that if a business wants to stop paying, they&#x27;re essentially locked into what they had paid for to that point, but haven&#x27;t lost their data or access to the features they had. They just stopped paying for ongoing development so they don&#x27;t get future features. That&#x27;s pretty neat.<p>Overall, I don&#x27;t see anything <i>wrong</i> about this approach, and a healthy sandstorm ecosystem and happy sandstorm devs is good for everyone, including those self-hosting the free version. It&#x27;s just now I have a tinge of disappointment thinking of all this great development I was getting for free before, that now might be spent on enterprise features not available to me.