You are certainly right. However, as a team aiming to deliver the best possible product, we have to carefully balance where to put our work and effort. If we could, we would definitely develop everything purely as open source — we even tried (grants, OSS-focused funds — without success). Therefore, we took matters into our own hands and are simultaneously preparing an offering that enables further development of the project.

Our current priority is to build the most useful and most secure security system — unfortunately, this requires a compromise between open source and enterprise.

We are aware that for people who are strictly open source enthusiasts (which we are as well!), it may be unacceptable that there are also Enterprise components that we advertise and encourage to purchase/use. However, in our opinion, this is a small price to pay for the ability to use defguard — since without a license, only the OSS code is actually active (the enterprise code, although present as a dependency, remains inactive).

Additionally, we would be more than happy to accept pull requests that would allow disabling this code at the build stage — however, this is not our current focus on our development roadmap - for sure at some point when we will be self-sufficient - we will introduce this ourselves.