Hey @jon-nfc
Thanks for taking the time to write all this up. To be honest with you, though, I feel like there’s a bit of hyperbole that undermines your overall position.
where you use and abuse the developers from the community
All whilst not providing back to the same community “you claim” to be part of
Red Hat does, in fact, provide back to the Ansible community in a variety of ways. Sponsoring conferences, facilitating meetups, funding for infrastructure are just some of the examples off the top of my head. I get that you might not like one response but it’s a bit of a stretch to think that represents the whole.
I feel like you make a good point about the focus on users though. Users are definitely an important persona when it comes to AWX. Jake touches on that in this section of the post about AWX and Ansible UI: AWX modernization: Ansible UI
When it comes to users, one of the things that I’ve heard again and again is that the requirement for kubernetes to run AWX was a real pain for users.
Yeah, kubernetes isn’t so hard but it is certainly overkill in loads of cases. That’s especially true for users who are “only technical enough to follow documentation to get the software working so they can use it”.
This is just my 2c but it seems kind of backwards to give “official” builds to community users. If you want “free AAP” you can always grab a developer subscription. Not being snarky about that and I hope it doesn’t come across that way. I genuinely think it would be a bit of a disservice to community users to get builds of a thing that is tailored for a different audience. Know what I mean?