Great, another stalker. Glad I bailed out a year or more ago to Jellyfin.

Is plex trying to accelerate their "customer" fleeing their platform? I'm pretty sure that one of the most important financial metrics they report is number of active users, and I'd think they'd be trying real hard to avoid customer churn. Sending out that "we're watching you" creepy vibe seems counterproductive.

So the people that make the free version of the software and the paid version of the software decided others were taking advantage of the free eval version, and stopping giving that away for free. Why not just use the CE version? It's been working fine for me for more than a decade. Is there functionality missing in the free CE version that you'll be giving up, or are you just pissed off that something changed unexpectedly in the selection of free things that are available to you?

Is OPNsense really more "open and friendly?" I dunno, I know some of the guys at Netgate professionally, and they're trying to run a business.. and for some reason, giving away software for free. Probably as a combination of giving back to the community and having people do testing at the same time. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.