Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses • Hacker News Board

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#101

Post by st3fan » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:27 PM UTC

rlonstein wrote: post #60

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…

dists/EULA: 3. Restrictions 3.1 You SHALL NOT, and shall not allow any third party, to: (a) decompile, disassemble, or otherwise reverse engineer the Software or attempt to reconstruct or discover any source code, underlying ideas, algorithms, file formats or programming interfaces of the Software by any means whatsoever (except and only to the extent that applicable law prohibits or restricts reverse engineering res…

How can this be compatible with the Apache License?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#102

Post by stephenr » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:28 PM UTC

rlonstein wrote: post #60

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…

dists/EULA: 3. Restrictions 3.1 You SHALL NOT, and shall not allow any third party, to: (a) decompile, disassemble, or otherwise reverse engineer the Software or attempt to reconstruct or discover any source code, underlying ideas, algorithms, file formats or programming interfaces of the Software by any means whatsoever (except and only to the extent that applicable law prohibits or restricts reverse engineering res…

How can 3.1a even be included? It's against the terms to discover the source code, that they themselves link to on the page you download from?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#103

Post by st3fan » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:28 PM UTC

mholt wrote: post #68

overcast wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been praying for proper distribution channels for installs. For a project that is all about simplicity in setup, the installation is such a hassle. Manually creating startup entries, directories, process users, horrible.

One of the things we're hoping to offer soon are official distro packages that can be customized with the plugins you want/need.

It does not matter if the binary restrictions and EULA are attached to those.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#104

Post by tjholowaychuk » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:29 PM UTC

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.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#105

Post by xena » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:30 PM UTC

i personally like how one of the first contact bits from caddy to a fork of it is a thinly veiled legal threat: https://github.com/WedgeServer/wedge/issues/2

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#106

Post by callahad » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:30 PM UTC

Congratulations on the launch, and good luck finding a sustainable means of funding Caddy. It's a uniquely ergonomic webserver.

That said, the unalterable Caddy-Sponsors HTTP header feels bad, and cheapens my overall impression of Caddy as a quality product. Now, instead of paying for a license to gain access to enterprise features or support, I'm paying to remove ads. From my webserver. Which now has a custom license that I have to read, remember, and figure out how to comply with.

I give up. I'm an individual running 8 little caddy containers on a $5/mo VPS. The cognitive load simply isn't worth it, and I hope you'll reconsider. Otherwise, it's back to cobbling things together with nginx and haproxy. :(

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#107

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:30 PM UTC

JamesMcMinn wrote: post #53

Well, I guess I'm moving switching from Caddy to NGINX then. I like Caddy, it's been great, but I have no interest in paying for support, and I'm certainly not going to pay to remove a HTTP header. Yes, I could spend time setting everything up to build custom versions of Caddy without the header, but it'll be quicker and easier to switch to NGINX. Whilst I really appreciate all the work that has gone into Caddy, I am…

[deleted]

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#108

Post by Whitestrake » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:34 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #100

Whitestrake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse? A valid point, and one we both know the answer to - I won't try to argue otherwise. While I think their statement on the issue page was not handled very well, and I would have tried to avoid the implicit threat... Do you think they should have just left it alone without saying anything once they were made aware of it?

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 disagree with the manner in which it was done.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#109

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:35 PM UTC

If Caddy had focused on providing commercial support to companeis that need it, this would have been a good day.

As it is, they are adding artificial roadblocks for open source users while providing minimal benefits to commercial users.

Someone didn't think this through or is out of touch with how to make money with open source.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#110

Post by callahad » Wed, Sep 13, 2017, 3:38 PM UTC

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.

Which is frustrating, because Caddy is a great product, especially from a solo operator standpoint. Configuration is simple and the defaults are sane. The humans behind Caddy are nice people.

And while this move has somewhat soured my opinion of the project, I'm not so much angry as I am... sad. I want to use Caddy. I am using Caddy. But I don't want to use this Caddy, at the moment.