You could make the same argument against Linux, openssl, ffmpeg, compression algorithms, web browsers and so many more things.

A select few will pay for the rest of us, but it's valuable to everyone who uses it.

Broadcom just wants to squeeze anyone who can't do it themselves.

I'm mixed... I've spent the time to create installers and docker images for a couple things, mostly because I wanted them to exist for myself, that others found them useful was a cool side effect. Nothing to the breadth or scope of Bitnami though.

That said, it seems to be a side effect of their business model that they don't feel they can offer for free, or otherwise choose not to in order to convince people to move. It seems there's nothing stopping someone from forking and/or continuing the packaging for apps they use based on where Bitnami is today. Cool.

I'd personally like to see a lot of these hardening efforts upstream anyway... separating base images for build vs. runtime and more so with the "official" app images themselves. People do and should have different expectations from a lot of applications when packaged in a container vs. installed on a system.

The problem isn't paying for it, it's the extra workload of retrofitting authentication to all your things. I'd find this a lot more enticing if they just made you set a "i have a license or i am evaluating or i am not commercial" flag in Helm or fail the build. Plus the cost is extremely disproportionate, but some will pay it given the one month deadline.