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

111–120 of 295 posts

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#111

Post by stephenr »

Whitestrake wrote: post #49
stephenr wrote: post #35

Copied comment from the other HN thread: $50 dollars a MONTH PER INSTANCE for a piece of software that wouldn't even start a few months ago because LetsEncrypt was down. I get that software takes time and people need to eat, but holy shit on a stick. Edit: Oh, and I forgot the part where it also doesn't handle FQDN's properly either. Previous discussion, from when LE was down for a day https://news.ycombinator.com/it…

I think your outburst might be rooted in a misunderstanding. As stated in a few other places in this thread, the software remains 100% free, including for commercial purposes. In order to make use of the build server at caddyserver.com, you need to have either a personal or commercial license. The build server provides precompiled binaries with your customized selection of plugins included. The use of the build serve…

I understand that the source is available.

My surprise is that you think anyone will pay $50 per month per instance forever, for a build service they might use only once, and that still requires them to actually do all the work to install it and run it as a service.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#112

Post by andmarios »

Not being able to use the release binaries (even from github) for commercial purposes is a bummer but if this is the price to pay for having caddy available as open source, then it is fair.

What I am afraid of, is that this friction to start with caddy (because $50 per month is way too much for most use cases) will affect its user base and as a consequence the participation in development. Of course mholt and the team behind caddy are the people who love it the most and care about its future the most, so I trust they will keep pushing forward.

For people who find it difficult to build caddy from source, here is an example, provided you have Go installed and configured:

  go get github.com/mholt/caddy
  go get github.com/caddyserver/builds
  
  cd "$GOPATH/src/github.com/mholt/caddy/caddy"

  # Enable cors, prometheus plugins.
  cat caddymain/plugins.go
  package caddymain
  
  import (
          _ "github.com/captncraig/cors/caddy"
          _ "github.com/miekg/caddy-prometheus"       
  )
  EOF
  
  go get -u -v -f ... || echo "Updated dependencies"
  go run build.go
Edit: updated with the latest build procedure

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#113

Post by callahad »

My first thought upon finding out that Caddy's source was still under an open source license was "can that change, too?"

As far as I can tell, the answer is "not unilaterally," as I don't see any requirements for copyright assignment in the contributing guidelines https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUT..., nor in merged pull requests.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#114

Post by JosephLark »

ddevault wrote: post #87

I said further below that this makes Caddy nonfree, but I was corrected - you can still build Caddy from source, remove the bullshit, and distribute your changes and compiled binaries under Apache 2.0. However, after examining the website more I feel the need to write another comment expressing how poorly this is being handled. The website is very misleading - on the download page, it now asks you to pick a license,…

I wanted to throw in a comment to register a little more than just a +1 to your post.

I get the need to monetize, but the way this has been done and the responses by them to the criticism in this thread has soured the project for me.

What I really appreciated about Caddy was the lack of friction in getting started with it. This has, IMO, thrown a huge gotcha in the way.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#115

Post by Whitestrake »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #104

Congrats! Good luck. Ignore all the angry people they clearly have no idea what it's like to try and make a living off this stuff, just entitled spoiled brats. Not to mention the salary that most developers make, paying $25-100/m for software you enjoy is not much. IMHO if you can't justify the price, then don't use it.

Well, everyone's opinion is valid and useful as feedback.

The good part is, if you can't justify the price, surely you can justify the time to write a bash script to compile it yourself? Further up this comments page is one fantastic example. There's still plenty of options, really, not much has changed.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#116

Post by Posibyte »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #99
pzb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the "distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name" can be problematic from a trademark perspective. This has come up many times before in other projects and led Debian to not use trademarked project names for software. If you are not familiar with the discussions, just search for "IceWeasel".

You're right, I hadn't thought of that. I still think going after a fork within minutes of its establishment for trademark infringement is in very bad faith, though.

And I think this is the crux of the issue with the trademark threats. They're going after these forks that haven't yet had enough time to signal intent to violate trademark, however pending it may be. You can say that they're just protecting their mark and that's fine and valid, but to do it within minutes of repo creation gives the uneasy feeling of them "dancing a mace in the air" to remind people who's the big guys on the block.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#117

Post by yorwba »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #92
ddevault wrote: post #87

I said further below that this makes Caddy nonfree, but I was corrected - you can still build Caddy from source, remove the bullshit, and distribute your changes and compiled binaries under Apache 2.0. However, after examining the website more I feel the need to write another comment expressing how poorly this is being handled. The website is very misleading - on the download page, it now asks you to pick a license,…

> It assumes you understand the Apache 2.0 license and makes no attempt to clarify that businesses can use the open source version. The authors are absolutely operating in bad faith here. The summary at the top completely omits the case of commercial users building from source, and the language confusion between "use Caddy" vs "use or distribute official Caddy binaries" intentionally tries to confuse the matter. > Re…

> Building Caddy from source and using it in your infrastructure requires no disclosure according to Apache 2.

You have to follow the terms of the license whenever you distribute it to someone. Unless you are a single-person shop, that might include employees who have access to the binaries but aren't actually interested in the source. You still have to appropriately disclose changes and keep the attribution notices.

You don't have to notify users who just access the server over the network, but the statement isn't factually incorrect: Apache 2.0 still applies.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#118

Post by lol768 »

Whitestrake wrote: post #108
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they should have waited more than a few minutes to start hassling the fork about it.

Yeah, they could have got away with waiting, maybe even a few days for everything to settle before making contact. But they're here in this thread, paying attention to the discussion, and people have wasted no time in making the fork in the first place. At the very least, I think the "absolutely devoid of class" comment is uncalled for. I don't think it's unreasonable, not even in terms of time frame, even if I disag…

> Yeah, they could have got away with waiting, maybe even a few days for everything to settle before making contact.

What frustrated me was that I'd already turned on the issue tracker and created an issue to monitor progress on removing links and references to Caddy.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#119

Post by e12e »

lol768 wrote: post #23

> As of version 0.10.9, Caddy emits an HTTP response header, Caddy-Sponsors, which is similar to the Server header that Caddy already has, except that this one credits our sponsors who make it possible to keep Caddy free for personal use. This header cannot be removed by the Caddyfile, and its presence is required by the non-commercial EULA. This requirement is waived by the commercial license, so the header is not p…

I get that a project want to sell licenses - but as a sibling comment states, Caddy appears to no longer be Free software, breaking freedom 1 (modify), 3 (distribute modified copies).

[ed: it appears I misunderstood, only the binaries are under eula - so Caddy is in the (somewhat) unique position of distributing non-free binaries and Free source code. Kind of like a gpled iOS program I guess.]

In addition, I'd consider this a (small) security vulnerability: the presence of the ad header effectively screams Caddy to fingerprinting tools. There's a reason apache and friends have a "prod" header config/setting.

[ed: seems a bit cruel to force the most resourceresource-limited users to advertise details about their stack; presumably those that know enough to compile themselves might also have more resources to keep up to date on security issues etc]

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#120

Post by Posibyte »

UseStrict wrote: post #88
lol768 wrote: post #23

> As of version 0.10.9, Caddy emits an HTTP response header, Caddy-Sponsors, which is similar to the Server header that Caddy already has, except that this one credits our sponsors who make it possible to keep Caddy free for personal use. This header cannot be removed by the Caddyfile, and its presence is required by the non-commercial EULA. This requirement is waived by the commercial license, so the header is not p…

Wow, in the course of this HN thread I went from learning about Caddy, to deciding against using it. Definitely not cool to immediately threaten legal action almost instantly after forking. Definitely not cool to force a header. I'll be sticking with nginx.

Exactly. I've heard raving reviews of how amazing Caddy is, but as I said earlier in this thread, the threat of filing trademark violations before even giving time for intent to be reasonably argued feels like a power play to scare the forks. It also makes their "We love Open Source!" claims feel much less genuine.

I'm not excited about it as much anymore :\

Post reply on HN