I had that reaction as well. At the end of the article, though, they explain where Ubuntu Core makes sense and why their use case doesn't (it seems that the main reason is they don't have a subscription model, so they can't budget ongoing costs, or something like that).
In my mind, I'm here wondering -- if you really need the features, spending your own dev time for self-maintenance has to cost more than $30k/year... what are they thinking?
> Accordingly, the risk for NextBox users would be that at some point in the future, Canonical would revoke this privilege from us, making NextBox un-updatable from one day to the next, or at worst, unusable.
> In addition, it became apparent that we had not selected sufficiently strict according to open source criteria. Assuming Canonical would eventually cease to exist or discontinue Ubuntu Core, it would be nearly impossible with Ubuntu Core for the open-source community to ensure that NextBox would continue to be usable in a meaningful way.
It's about more than the monetary costs over the coming couple of years. Canonical pulling a RedHat here would be much worse for Ubuntu Core users than it is/was for CentOS users.
In my mind, I'm here wondering -- if you really need the features, spending your own dev time for self-maintenance has to cost more than $30k/year... what are they thinking?