Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

caddyserver.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 295 posts

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#11

Post by mholt »

winter_blue wrote: post #4

Key Quote: To be clear, this EULA applies only to Caddy binaries you download; it does not apply to the source code. Caddy is still open source, and the source code is under the same Apache 2.0 license. Doesn't this mean that you can simply compile Caddy from source, and avoid having to pay for commercial use? Most Caddy users are likely going be comfortable with compiling stuff, so what benefits does paying bring be…

You're right, you can build from source under the Apache license. Keeping the project truly open source is really important to us, because the community is such a great part of using Caddy.

Commercial licenses would only cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year if your organization has at least 160 instances in use. Keep in mind that modifying the source is required to plug in any plugins, which people tend not to want to bother with.

We're also looking into adding more features for our customers.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#13

Post by Whitestrake »

romanovcode wrote: post #7

> If you use Caddy for personal, academic, or non-profit purposes, not much is different. Caddy-Sponsors HTTP Header > If you use or distribute official Caddy binaries at work, or as part of a product/service, you will need a commercial license If I have some personal project which I want to incorporate I need to worry about the license. Oh, time to switch back to NGINX. Thanks for automated HTTPS while it lasted.

This is incorrect, or at least only half-true.

Caddy is still Apache 2.0 licensed. You can use it for free for commercial purposes. You just can't use the build server at caddyserver.com to download a precompiled Caddy with plugins. Instead, you can download the source, compile it with plugins yourself, then distribute your own binary amongst all your hosts.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#14

Post by calcifer »

romanovcode wrote: post #7

> If you use Caddy for personal, academic, or non-profit purposes, not much is different. Caddy-Sponsors HTTP Header > If you use or distribute official Caddy binaries at work, or as part of a product/service, you will need a commercial license If I have some personal project which I want to incorporate I need to worry about the license. Oh, time to switch back to NGINX. Thanks for automated HTTPS while it lasted.

Or use an unofficial build, like those found in Linux distro repositories.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#15

Post by yroc92 »

romanovcode wrote: post #7

> If you use Caddy for personal, academic, or non-profit purposes, not much is different. Caddy-Sponsors HTTP Header > If you use or distribute official Caddy binaries at work, or as part of a product/service, you will need a commercial license If I have some personal project which I want to incorporate I need to worry about the license. Oh, time to switch back to NGINX. Thanks for automated HTTPS while it lasted.

Can I ask what the project is?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#16

Post by tiernano »

davb wrote: post #3

> 1/4 price of comparable servers Which servers?

Wondering the same thing... nginx has a commercial option, but does not force you to use it if your using it in a business environment... iis is only available on windows server, and that costs about 600 quid for a standard license. That’s a one off cost... so... it might be quarter of the cost of enterprise (3k give or take) but over the life time of the box, it would end up being more...

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#18

Post by st3fan »

This is all great, I hope this turns into a viable business. But I am just not sure about the approach here.

Maybe this is a good moment for someone to finally fork Caddy, remove the Sponsors header, and distribute proper RPMs and DEBs.

Then those of us who want to use a truly open source project with no strings attached (special conditions re binaries, EULA, etc.) have nothing to worry about.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#19

Post by stavros »

I've been trying to get Caddy more widely deployed at work, and this move is going to alienate commercial customers (at least us) even more than Caddy already does.

Not only do they not have repositories, essentially doubling the effort to keep machines up to date (we have to have one process to upgrade everything else, and one process to upgrade just Caddy), but now we can't even download precompiled binaries to deploy on the servers without paying.

I could have put up with Caddy not being as mature as nginx for some low-volume deployments, and barely put up with the lack of debs, but having to compile my own binaries across the company isn't worth the integrated TLS certs.

Post reply on HN