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Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

caddyserver.com

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Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#141

Post by tjholowaychuk »

callahad wrote: post #126
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.

It's not $25-100/mo, it's effectively $50/mo per instance of Caddy, including your local development machine: https://caddyserver.com/pricing Running three static sites in their own containers, plus a fourth Caddy as a reverse proxy, and your laptop? That's $250/mo. Is a buddy of yours also working on one of those sites? Oops, now you're at the $500/mo (10 license) tier.

Sure, but individuals can just use the OSS version, or something like Netlify which is ideal for static anyway. Pricing that seems expensive to individual developers is pennies for any real business.

I regret to inform people, but the world isn't free. Open source is great because it's a low barrier for people getting started with a business or project, but if a company benefits from it they should pay.

This sort of duel license fragmentation is unfortunately the only option for people like us trying to make a living from OSS.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#142

Post by mholt »

jayrox wrote: post #82
mholt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember this only applies to official binaries. The EULA itself states it doesn't apply to the source code.

Is that specified somewhere? I mean, I see this in the EULA `READ IT CAREFULLY BEFORE COMPLETING THE INSTALLATION PROCESS AND USING OFFICIAL CADDY BINARIES AND RELATED SOFTWARE COMPONENTS ("Software").` But is there something that specifically says the EULA only applies to official binaries and not the source code or self compiled binaries?

Yes, yes, it's everywhere: the pricing page, the blog post, and the EULA itself says right near the top:

> The open source code of this Software is licensed under the terms of the Apache License Version 2.0 and not under this EULA.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#143

Post by mholt »

stephenr wrote: post #102
rlonstein wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Prohibiting reverse engineering of the binaries is a standard restriction. If prevents not-well-formed copies of the source code being distributed, and as you said, they can just download the source from the repository. :)

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#144

Post by snark42 »

bauerd wrote: post #42
StavrosK wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers? I find that a bit disingenuous. You can't both include annoying headers and argue that they aren't annoying anyone because nobody will see them. If nobody will see them, why add them in the first place?

To give commercial users an incentive to pay for the open source software they use. Can you name an open source project that does not offer extended features for commercial versions and that sells? Because I can't

> Can you name an open source project that does not offer extended features for commercial versions and that sells?

pfSense, Ceph (prior to RH purchase) and OpenNebula off the top of my head.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#145

Post by rlonstein »

sfifs wrote: post #55
donatj wrote: post #45

Caddy is OK, easy to setup on a personal machine, but nginx's performance trumped it completely in our testing. Particularly when requesting large numbers of files concurrently. I genuinely don't know why a business would use Caddy over nginx, especially given the new commercial licensing scheme. nginx really isn't that hard to setup.

Running Caddy is literally copying a binary and your site over and setting up the systemd config. LetsEncrypt works automagically out of the box.

> LetsEncrypt works automagically out of the box

Provided you let Caddy manage all the certs and/or permit dynamic dns updates on that host. Went through this last night and it's underdocumented when you want to handle it yourself with TXT records and explicit cert/key.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#147

Post by gtirloni »

mholt wrote: post #44
ash wrote: post #34

> We now require declaring a license when requesting a download: > / ?license=personal" rel="nofollow">https://caddyserver.com/download/ / ?license=persona... > The value for the license variable can be either personal or commercial. > … > We require the license parameter because we feel it's important for the license to be deliberate, not assumed. To ease the transition into this, though, we'll allow the current syn…

I'll work on that. But the error message is very clear, so if any error reporting is enabled, it'll be pretty obvious what to do, at least. The fact that people were relying on volunteer-supported infrastructure for their CI builds is a little unnerving to me, hence the move to commercial support.

Is this move the result of open source burnout?

There are better ways to structure a business around an open source project.

Besides comprehensive support plans, you could actually pursue dual licensing (if you own the copyright to all contributions, I couldn't find a CLA), consulting services, etc. This is all in the playbook followed by nginx, Red Hat and others.

I think even the dreaded "open core" model would give yours users less friction than what you're implementing.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#148

Post by gtirloni »

iampims wrote: post #134
mholt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll work on that. But the error message is very clear, so if any error reporting is enabled, it'll be pretty obvious what to do, at least. The fact that people were relying on volunteer-supported infrastructure for their CI builds is a little unnerving to me, hence the move to commercial support.

Why not upload them to GitHub?

Exactly, building and pushing to GitHub is a set-and-forget process. Besides, it already needs to be done for paying customers now so what kind of work is that saving Caddy? I don't understand.

EDIT: Additionally, it's an error to think that non-paying customers are not contributing. It's actually a pretty basic misunderstanding for an open source company. Users are contributing with bug reports, small fixes, testing, marketing, etc. It amazes me we still see this feeling in 2017. I dare all companies with open source projects to actually close them and replace non-paying customers with QA teams, more developers, more infrastructure, etc. Make sure to increase your budgets and raise your prices accordingly.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#149

Post by callahad »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #141
callahad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not $25-100/mo, it's effectively $50/mo per instance of Caddy, including your local development machine: https://caddyserver.com/pricing Running three static sites in their own containers, plus a fourth Caddy as a reverse proxy, and your laptop? That's $250/mo. Is a buddy of yours also working on one of those sites? Oops, now you're at the $500/mo (10 license) tier.

Sure, but individuals can just use the OSS version, or something like Netlify which is ideal for static anyway. Pricing that seems expensive to individual developers is pennies for any real business. I regret to inform people, but the world isn't free. Open source is great because it's a low barrier for people getting started with a business or project, but if a company benefits from it they should pay. This sort of…

You're absolutely correct, but it's still frustrating. :(

It's totally within rights, and the rates are completely reasonable for funded or profitable ventures. I'm just bummed that I can't quickly grab a Caddy binary and toss it in a container to help host, e.g., a little Bugzilla dashboard / frontend without worrying that I'm violating the "business use" or "internal company use" clauses.

I've used Apache, Lighttpd, Cherokee, and Nginx over the years, and this is the first time that an open source webserver has asked me to make a commercial/noncommercial distinction when using the core software. And while I could compile the OSS version, switching back to Nginx is a lower friction, simpler option.

On the upside, these decisions are mutable, and Caddy is excellent software produced by really great, reasonable people. I'm sure the kinks will get worked out eventually.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#150

Post by warrenm »

mholt wrote: post #78
lol768 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why's that? (And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?) I dislike this for a few reasons. Firstly, it honestly comes across as petty. I'm using the server for personal reasons, it's for a non-commercial site which I don't make money off. I don't display ads, and suddenly I'm now being forced to serve ads to my visitors. The medium of delivery is utterly irreleva…

> Secondly, it makes it more difficult to take steps to make it less obvious which web server is being used. I'd do this to make it slightly more difficult for script kiddies looking to exploit recent vulnerabiltiies - not because I think security through obscurity is a good idea. I thought about this as well, but I'm not convinced that hiding the Server header or anything like unto it is really that beneficial. Most…

>> used it for personal use (costing you nothing)

> This unfortunately isn't true. It costs a LOT of time and effort to maintain the build infrastructure and the Caddy project itself, even if its users don't make a profit from it.

Yes - it is true.

The incremental cost for every additional Caddy install is 0 (or, as close to 0 as you can calculate for bandwidth charges).

So ... no. It does not cost you anything for an additional user to run Caddy. It is a sunk cost for any given new development - whether one person runs it, or millions.

But instead of realizing this, you've now put-off a vast swath of potential users.

Bad form.

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