> Possibly because a developer hired to write something around usbip would cost a lot less. https://usbip.sourceforge.net/
Would it? For the sake of discussion, I'll assume "thousands of raspberry pi's" = 2,000 RBpis, or something around $10,000 in license fees.
I don't know anything about either project beyond the links shared by you and the root comment, but based on the information at each link and the assumption of $10,000 spend:
I would choose the one time cost of VirtualHere's purpetual update license and release cadence over a some short dev for hire contract to write some unmaintained wrapper code around a sourceforge library that hasn't been been touched in over a decade.
$49 times 2,000 is $98,000, not around $10,000. Yet your argument still holds. There are many reasons for that.
1. You are paying a developer that works 100% on that, year after year, and not a hire that won't be there when something goes wrong in the future after an OS update, new hardware, anything. This is basically your argument. Let me add:
2. In some parts of the world far away from SV but still in the West, $100k are about two years of gross developer salary, not what the developer actually gets at the end of the month. Point 1 still holds. Where it's 10 years of salary maybe companies could be tempted by a custom solution.
3. You are giving $49 per server to that developer but you are probably getting more per server from your customers. If you have thousands of servers you probably have a viable business, so that's just yet another cost of doing business.
usbip has made me angry for 5 years now, there is supposedly an open source windows client, but you have to put windows into some unsafe bullshit mode to be able to use unsigned drivers??
So you have to compromise your entire system to use one program
I mean you could sign it yourself. Or donate to a maintainer so they can sign it. Open source or other community windows drivers usually aren’t signed unless they have donors paying for it, certs aren’t free :)
If anything it’s on windows for not having a way to allow just one unsigned driver.
so you've spent 1000s * $49 for the license?