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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon smallstep

Reason for EAB removal

Open fritterhoff opened this issue 3 years ago • 2 comments

Out of curiosity: Why were the EAB functionalities removed with commit d00729df0b6ba17e164b306256bcf00cb2cb7b3b?

fritterhoff avatar Apr 13 '22 04:04 fritterhoff

an anniversary of this bug is close and it's still open – perhaps we could get a bit of explanation?

(i'm quite curious myself; i can live with not having the functionality, but would like to know if there's a straightforward technical reason or it's just a business decision)

jubalfh avatar Mar 29 '23 20:03 jubalfh

Hey, I'm sorry for the radio silence. We had intended to respond to this issue a while ago. The answer is nuanced, and I'm guessing that's why it's fallen through the cracks.

The tl;dr is business decision. We believe EAB is an advanced use case and therefore makes more sense as part of our "paid product" offering.

We struggle a lot internally deciding what should and should not be part of the open core. We fundamentally do not believe in releasing crippleware - projects that cannot be used due to paywall. In this case, we believe that the ACME functionality of the product is still completely usable. EAB adds a layer of policy and security beyond that which is already offered by the ACME protocol - we consider this an advanced use case.

dopey avatar Mar 31 '23 18:03 dopey