Hi BrindleFly.
My name is Hongli Lai, and I am the CTO of Phusion and main developer behind Phusion Passenger. We noticed this topic moments ago.
I apologize for the inconvenience that this problem has caused you, but I'd like to point out that your problem has got absolutely nothing to do with us selling a commercial version. For one, we take pride in writing stable, robust, well-performing software, whether we charge for it or not. The open source version of Phusion Passenger is a fully-featured, mature product that stands on its own, even without Enterprise enhancements. Deliberately making software fail with obscure errors, such as what *appears* to be the case for you, goes against every part of our philosophy and morals.
Second, the *only* technical changes in the Enterprise version are as advertised on https://www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise and as documented in the manual. There are absolutely no technical changes between the open source and the Enterprise version which would cause a difference in behavior like this. We only sell on features, not on core stability.
In other words: the problem you're experiencing is most likely just a bug. If that's the case then the bug would exist in both the open source as well as the Enterprise version. Your problem description is most peculiar: you mentioned that compiling out the Phusion Passenger module in Nginx makes things work. However the Phusion Passenger module doesn't do *anything* unless you explicitly set `passenger_enabled` on for that context, and in no way changes Nginx's core behavior. Having said that, I do not exclude the possibility that there are subtle interactions which could still introduce incompatibilities.
I would like to invite you, or anybody who experiences similar problems, to contact us through the Phusion Passenger community discussion forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/phusion-passenger and to provide more information.
If this really is a bug, we'll do our best to fix it, Enterprise user or not.
With kind regards,
Hongli Lai