Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

It only advertises to people hitting your site with curl or looking at the HTTP headers, so basically sysops guys curious about what your stack is. Actual end users will almost never see it. So what?

We switched to OpenResty lately for our nginx bundle and it changes the nginx Server header to OpenResty, and I cared so little I didn't even bother to put a sed command in our install script to change it. It could say Diet Pepsi Uh Huh It's The One.. who cares? Maybe I'm going to do that with the next update just to make a point. The only reason anybody would even notice is because I told them about it.

FOSS is in serious trouble right now because the funding model is in shambles, and the only way we get anything good funded now is if the megacorps decide to fund something. We need to find better ways for the little guys to put food on their tables, or we're doomed as a community. We tried direct payments to FOSS devs, and that went up in flames. These guys came up with a clever and unintrusive way to advertise (really just to show sponsors, which isn't really even advertising) to tech people, and instead of being supportive of a novel way to fund their project everybody screams bloody murder at them.

If the FOSS community wants to continue to exist as a venue for quality software, the first step it needs to take is to stop chewing its own arms off. Please have a perspective here and understand that these developers are just trying to make a living, just like all of us are. The only thing worse than starving to death making something free for other people is doing it while they sit there and hate you for trying to figure out how to put food on the table. All the quality people will leave FOSS forever, and we'll be stuck with a bunch of random unmaintained garbage and bizarro overengineered UI crap Facebook wants to publish to status compete with Google's bizarro overengineered UI crap, and we'll all be worse off for it.

> > > "this bug is yours because you self compiled this thing", > never heard anything like that in my life.

Off the top of my head, Google requires you to own any new third-party dependencies you pull into the source tree. Therefore, Google engineers think very carefully about their dependencies.

Also, anecdotally, once my team (at a $100M start-up) decided vanilla Rails/ActiveResource didn't fully support our needs and we'd have to fork/extend it, then we needed an owner. That guy was me. Before I took on ownership, we'd simply file issues with the ActiveResource team and offer changesets if we had the free time to debug. When we brought it in internally, I was required to field all support. It definitely cost our company more, obviously, and it would've been much more convenient and possibly much cheaper to rely on a third-party vendor.

Looking at it again, it seems their cloud configuration backup service has special client code and could qualify as such. But the primary thing seems to be access to information, the devs and an officially certified VM for AWS.

It's not about forking, it's about forking with the intent to compete (which this was, as it was advertised as an alternative here). In that respect, regardless of the Github.com terms of service says, federal trademark law is likely to supercede it.

I don't know why people are freaking out about this so much. It's one header.

Also, it's been made painfully clear that the source code is not covered by the EULA and is still licensed under Apache 2.0, so if you build from source yourself you can use it without any change, just like before this announcement.

It's not like this is some ungodly C project where you need to gather all your dependencies together and debug the build process when it doesn't work on your machine. The project is written in Go and has no external dependencies so building from source is literally just:

  - Install Go if you don't have it already
  - Run `go get -u github.com/mholt/caddy/caddy`
  - cd to $GOPATH/src/github.com/mholt/caddy/caddy
  - Run `go install`
  - Use the resulting caddy.exe file for free like you always have done

If you don't like the Caddy-Sponsors header then you can just edit the `github.com/mholt/caddy/caddyhttp/header/header.go` file and comment out the lines:

  if name == "Caddy-Sponsors" || name == "-Caddy-Sponsors" {
      // see EULA
      continue
  }

Then build the project, except now you can remove the sponsor header with `-Caddy-Sponsors` in your Caddyfile. If you need a plugin then just download the plugin you want from github and import it before building: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/wiki/Extending-Caddy

@mholt has made the entire process so unbelievably easy that the whole process takes literally minutes...