I get why some people are upset about a lot of the features being for enterprise. Vault gets a lot of love from the community, and their GitHub boasts 369 contributors currently, so it can be disappointing to see bits siloed off.

But, in the end, they're a company and need to make some money. I think it's fine to do this with certain features to encourage companies to support software that can be integral to their infrastructure.

A little breakdown of free vs beyond-average-developer-reach here (this is an assumption from the 'Enterprise' moniker for a security product, lack of pricing page, and no mid-level tier; I do not know their pricing):

A breakdown
* Identity (included) - Free; useful for non-enterprise. Agree here.

* Seal Wrap (enterprise) - FIPS-2 from HSM and FIPS-compliant cloud, with evaluation to meet regulatory compliance. Much more useful for enterprise. I consider this safe to be considered an Enterprise feature.

* Control Groups (enterprise) - Allows use of approval workflow in access policies, requiring multiple party consent for access to individual secrets. This classification is somewhat dicey, in that it seems fairly core to what gave it a lot early attention (sharded seal/unseal keys - require x of n pieces of a key to unlock). And yet.. if you have an organization which requires 'bob' to ask both 'alice' and 'jane' whether they can see the database password for 10 minutes, you probably run a business or at least have a budget. Workflow customization is usually a great spot to put that pesky Enterprise label. In the end I agree its worth siloing.

* Sentinel integration (enterprise) - Integration with other Enterprise product. Agree here.

* Vault UI (enterprise) - Web interface to manage vault clusters. I disagree here. If we need to tier it, that's fine. Maybe even make it closed-source if that reduces the development overhead (though, I dunno, with 369 contributors I think they would benefit from it being partially open). Require enterprise license to enable enterprise feature. Hide them from users unless they are enterprise. Let anyone use it for non-enterprise features. You throw away one of the benefits of open source by making this closed, namely that if it's open then you make it more accessible to people. People who use the open source version are a lot more likely to advocate for the enterprise version.

* Cloud Auto-Unseal (enterprise) - On the fence on this one. Plenty of people would use this if it was available, I think, because cloud HSM are a lot more accessible than your hardware HSM. But I don't know that anyone would legitimately pay money for this if they weren't a business. It's kind of a 'nice to have' as non-enterprise user. Meanwhile business will definitely pay for this. I am willing to side on 'enterprise' here a little.

So, that's it for the headlines. Only one non-enterprise headliner, but in the end I only really disagree with one decision, and have a couple ambivalents.

Some of the other, more interesting (because people can actually use it) stuff, that is mostly free, is in the 'Other features' item at the end. Kubernetes Auth backend, RSA for transit backend (though I'm not sure of the benefit of this over other types of keys), Google IAM auth backend, etc.

All that said, I don't know if they will really see a lot more traffic for their blogs on social media if we keep seeing see a bunch of enterprise-focused release announcements with most of the regular work pushed to a changelog linked at the end.