So if Monospace discovers that a company lied on the attestation, they have a signed document to use in a legal proceeding. Plus every self-hosted instance phones home with an organization name, contact email, and size attestation. So now Monospace has a directory of every organization using their software, what size they “say” they are, and how to contact them. So when a company that registered at under 25 headcount posts a job listing saying they have 26 employees, Directus enterprise sales team can reach out. When a company raises a Series B that gets announced on TechCrunch, Directus can check the registry and send an invoice.
Sure. Well, reach out to discuss… not send an invoice. But yes, what’s wrong with this? Not everyone has to register, but you do for certain usage.
Small teams and organizations will be disproportionately affected by this change, as icouto suggested.
How are they affected?
I work with some small government contractors who operate in environments with strict data governance and network security requirements. A self-hosted tool that phones home with organizational details to a third-party vendor is a non-starter in those environments. The whole point of self-hosting for these organizations is that nothing leaves their network.
Correct. The paid enterprise tier is for SCIM, Invoicing, and Offline Mode.
So if you need “offline mode” then you would need to pay for the enterprise version of the software when you move into production and need to air-gap.
Governments aren’t covered by our free Innovation Grant. But you can reach out if doing work for an NGO, non-profit, OSS project, etc.
Forced registration turns a self-hosted product into a product with a SaaS dependency, which is exactly what these users were trying to avoid by self-hosting in the first place.
A bit reductive to say that the only reason for self-hosting it to avoid software registration.
We have a free tier that will not require registration. And there will be a trial and grace period too.
If you want to use our full software for free, then yes, there is a requirement to attest you’re following the terms to get a free key… and basic product telemetry (the same as now).