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Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

caddyserver.com

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Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#161

Post by iampims »

gtirloni wrote: post #148
iampims wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Answering my own question: it is now my understanding that caddy relies on a custom build system to generate custom builds on the fly for its plugins. Publishing all combinations on GH wouldn't make much sense given the combination explosion for any new plugin.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#162

Post by llao »

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.

It is worth revisiting the trademark-thread, the responses of everyone involved are level-headed and civil.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#163

Post by [deleted] »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #122
Whitestrake wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure, but I think a lot of people have to realize they're not the target market for this kind of thing. You simply cannot make a living from people trying to run their side projects for Seeing people complain about paying for software is just annoying. They should work for free then, if that's their mentality.

[deleted]

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#164

Post by djvdorp »

stavros wrote: post #62
mholt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Cory's working on this, actually. If we can get it working, we should be able to offer official Caddy packages to all our customers, customized just how they need it to be, so your 'apt upgrade' could upgrade Caddy as well…

> it's not "apt install" but it's pretty close It's not close, though, it's very far. With apt, I know things are going to go in their proper place, and are going to get cleaned up afterwards (not to mention the biggest benefit, automatic updates). With a shell script, I don't know what sort of stuff it puts where on my filesystem, and I can't automate the installation easily. My preferred order of installation proce…

My thoughts exactly. And I am afraid we are moving even further away from packages with this move..

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#165

Post by JosephLark »

Came back to this thread during lunch, and a few things I'm seeing have me more worried about Caddy than I originally was. Originally it just seemed like a very minor misstep, but now it seems more likely to be the start of something worse.

Can I ask - what exactly is Light Code Labs? The page really doesn't say much. It almost seems like some 3rd year Computer Engineering student at BYU came along and talked Matt Holt into creating a business of Caddy? I can't see anything about business expertise, and in the wedge fork trademark issue the other co-founder just responded that he was "part owner of Light Code Labs" and nothing about development. On the site it just says this person "recently got into web development...[and] wants technology to be more intuitive for people to use".

It might just be my dislike of fluffy BS, but it seems like red flags to me.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#166

Post by StavrosK »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #90
bauerd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a difference between "extended features for commercial versions" and "adware". Usually the open source version includes core features that solve a basic set of problems, and the commercial versions add additional features to solve other and/or larger problems. At no point is there an explicit crippling of the open source. What's particularly frustrating is the burying of the lede here. The summary of the page…

Exactly. I would have no issue if paid usage was for things big companies are more likely to need, e.g. support, high-performance features, etc, like nginx does, but this is egregious.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#167

Post by deftnerd »

e12e wrote: post #119
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 consid…

Synergy, the app that allows a computer to share its mouse and keyboard over the network to other computers, did a more aggressive move a few years ago. It's still technically GPL because you can compile it yourself, but they charge $20 for a binary license and to enable certain features.

I have similar concerns. I practice good security but I also enjoy security through obscurity. I prefer to prevent my users from knowing what web server is serving their content. Now unless I start compiling from scratch, everyone will know I use Caddy and I don't like that.

Alternative is to run Caddy behind HAProxy or Nginx or something similar that can strip those headers out.

I think it's time to just rebuild and use Nginx again and try to get QUIC and automatic LetsEncrypt working.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#168

Post by StavrosK »

djvdorp wrote: post #164
stavros wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not "apt install" but it's pretty close It's not close, though, it's very far. With apt, I know things are going to go in their proper place, and are going to get cleaned up afterwards (not to mention the biggest benefit, automatic updates). With a shell script, I don't know what sort of stuff it puts where on my filesystem, and I can't automate the installation easily. My preferred order of installation proce…

My thoughts exactly. And I am afraid we are moving even further away from packages with this move..

Yeah... What I don't understand is why nginx doesn't have built-in LetsEncrypt cert fetching yet.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#169

Post by heipei »

caddyserver.com emits those headers if you want to see them in action: https://urlscan.io/result/8093833b-8ac7-4d18-8f20-a02373f577... Go to the first transaction, click the show button and click "Show headers". Right now it says:

  caddy-sponsors - This free web server is made possible by its sponsors: Minio, Uptime Robot, and Sourcegraph
Personal opinion: I've never understood the appeal of Caddy except for the builtin Let's Encrypt / TLS automagic support. nginx is very powerful and at the same time pretty easy to configure, and I think they split the features between the Open Source and commercial version pretty reasonably.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#170

Post by [deleted] »

mholt wrote: post #56
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?

I know devs who use Sublime Text almost indefinitely without paying. They don't mind the little "Hey don't forget to buy" popup every once in a while. We aren't putting popups on your site. :P

[deleted]
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