> We started SlicerVM ....
Shame you did not mention once in your long post that you are based on Firecracker, because I'm sure I'm not the first who was about to post "why is this better than Firecracker".
Also it is a shame you've adopted the subscription billing model instead of allowing people to buy perpetual licenses.
I dislike the subscription model in a pure sense, but also I dislike the "but its 'only' $x a month" argument oft-used by developers. Sure, in theory that's the case. But like everyone else in the world, I also have $x a month of other monthly expenses in my life, and I simply do not need or want N+1 software subscriptions. It all adds up.
The same applies to business environments, except the cost becomes even more exponential because you have (X-employees * N-subscriptions)/month.
Yeah. I agree, I saw the SaaS-style pricing for running on my own infra and couldn't see any reason why I'd want this. I also don't see the technical upside to SlicerVM. It feels very risky given I've never heard of anyone actually running this in production. I think I'd take my chances with Proxmox plus microVM add-ons first.
Author of a free open source alternative to slicer, based on a fork of libkrun (not firecracker based) that runs locally across wsl, macOS, and Linux natively.
https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
I noticed this when it was first announced on HN as well. Hoping to give it a try as well shortly.