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Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

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Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#181

Post by unethical_ban »

mattbee wrote: post #172

@mholt is being exceedingly generous to the whingers on this thread, on top of the generosity he's shown in writing Caddy to start with. It's not 2005 any more, Sun Microsystems is long gone. You won't raise any money from a business model that gives away your best work or selling support contracts alone. Caddy is a real innovation, and brings web server defaults bang up to date - it makes loads of complex configurat…

Eh. Still kind of shitty to have had access and then have it removed, and then say 'nothing has really changed, guys!'.

If they rephrased it to admit they're moving to a Red Hat model of "pay for binary", the news would have fared better. More straightforward, with a direct comparison to a current, successful brand.

Let's face it: They realized their product was popular, took advantage of tons of interest and documentation/blogs/hype in the community, then decided to charge for binary distribution. It's a bit of a burn.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#182

Post by jimjimjim »

JamesMcMinn wrote: post #83
mholt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caddy is still open source, Apache licensed. You can certainly build from source as long as you give attribution and state your changes.

Matt, I really do appreciate the work you and others have put into Caddy - it's a fantastic piece of software which has served me well for the past year and a bit. Having said that, this change has put me in a position where I have to invest either time or money into a solution for a problem which I didn't have yesterday, and switching to NGINX seems like the path least likely to cause issues in the future. Having to…

you are 'not willing to pay' money or time?

why not?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#183

Post by kradle »

Just wanted to add that we've experimented with Caddy awhile back and, while it didn't suit our needs at the time, the first impression was a good one and I've since kept the project in the back of my mind.

However, the responses from the Caddy folks here and at https://github.com/WedgeServer/wedge/issues/2 have been abysmal and without a clear change in course I'd feel embarrassed to recommend it to colleagues.

It's not even about the licenses, as others have said, this is just bad form.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#184

Post by jimjimjim »

JamesMcMinn wrote: post #96
eropple wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a small nudge to actually pay for the thing that benefits you, or have a small note somewhere that you're not paying for it that someone might--gasp!--see, is as big a deal as the histrionics throughout this thread suggest. You don't have a problem because there's an HTTP header, you have a problem because this makes you feel uncomfortable and you want to hide it, and that strikes me as a very different…

Or perhaps I'm a student with no income trying to write a thesis at the same time as bootstrap a startup, and can't afford to spend $100/month on a reverse proxy? The new EULA states I'm not allowed to use the personal build, so I have little choice in that matter. Your "worldview" doesn't seem to extend past the end of your own nose.

you are a student and you are using something for FREE and you are also at the same time worried about extra stuff in the headers?

what is your startup going to do to generate money if you perpetuate the belief that no one should pay for anything?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#185

Post by gtirloni »

iampims wrote: post #161
gtirloni wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's excellent. Most people don't seem to use plugins so a default build is enough for them. Those who need it have a business need now and can either setup their own build system or pay Caddy for that. Value is generated as opposed to being subtracted (from the current status quo).

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#186

Post by jlgaddis »

yroc92 wrote: post #15
romanovcode wrote: post #7

> If you use Caddy for personal, academic, or non-profit purposes, not much is different. Caddy-Sponsors HTTP Header > If you use or distribute official Caddy binaries at work, or as part of a product/service, you will need a commercial license If I have some personal project which I want to incorporate I need to worry about the license. Oh, time to switch back to NGINX. Thanks for automated HTTPS while it lasted.

Can I ask what the project is?

> "If I have some personal project..." (emphasis added)

It was a hypothetical.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#187

Post by JamesMcMinn »

jimjimjim wrote: post #182
JamesMcMinn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt, I really do appreciate the work you and others have put into Caddy - it's a fantastic piece of software which has served me well for the past year and a bit. Having said that, this change has put me in a position where I have to invest either time or money into a solution for a problem which I didn't have yesterday, and switching to NGINX seems like the path least likely to cause issues in the future. Having to…

you are 'not willing to pay' money or time? why not?

Because it feels like a bad investment.

In terms of cash, $1200 a year is a lot to me personally, I'm a student, I have no income, and I'm trying to bootstrap a startup. $1200 could feed me for a year. Even when I had my PhD stipend, $1200 was a months stipend.

I originally chose to use Caddy over NGINX because it made https easy: just download, configure, run. If I have to remove the sponsor code and build it myself, it loses the advantage it had over NGINX because now I've got to spent time creating a build script and updating it whenever Caddy makes changes. With NGINX, sure, I'll have to configure it and letsencrypt, but I'll only ever have to do that once.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#188

Post by [deleted] »

mattbee wrote: post #172

@mholt is being exceedingly generous to the whingers on this thread, on top of the generosity he's shown in writing Caddy to start with. It's not 2005 any more, Sun Microsystems is long gone. You won't raise any money from a business model that gives away your best work or selling support contracts alone. Caddy is a real innovation, and brings web server defaults bang up to date - it makes loads of complex configurat…

[deleted]

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#189

Post by PenguinCoder »

To everyone saying that Caddy made it simple for automated LE; I agree, but also, it's not that difficult to setup with NGINX:

Edit /var/nginx/ssl_common.conf

  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live//fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live//privkey.pem;
  
  location ^~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
        default_type "text/plain";
        allow all;
        root /var/www/example;
        auth_basic off;
  }
Edit crontab, add:

  30 2 * * 1 /bin/certbot -a webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/example renew --renew-hook "systemctl restart nginx"
Make the cert

  mkdir -p /var/www/example
  certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/example/ -d www.example.com
In your NGINX HTTPS server blocks add:

  include ssl_common.conf
That should be it...

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#190

Post by JamesMcMinn »

jimjimjim wrote: post #184
JamesMcMinn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps I'm a student with no income trying to write a thesis at the same time as bootstrap a startup, and can't afford to spend $100/month on a reverse proxy? The new EULA states I'm not allowed to use the personal build, so I have little choice in that matter. Your "worldview" doesn't seem to extend past the end of your own nose.

you are a student and you are using something for FREE and you are also at the same time worried about extra stuff in the headers? what is your startup going to do to generate money if you perpetuate the belief that no one should pay for anything?

The startup has extremely limited resources, it's a bootstrap, as I explained. The licence prohibits us from using the personal licence, and there is a time cost involved in building and maintaining our own version. $1200 a year is not good value for us when NGINX will do the job for free.

I never claimed that no one should pay for anything, and I wish the people working on Caddy the best of luck. I think it's a fantastic piece of software and, as I have said several times, I am very grateful for the effort that has been put into making the project what it is.

However the change means that I have to act or be left with an out-of-date internet facing server. If you cannot see why I am annoyed at being given no choice but to spend time or money on solution because Caddy has introduced a new commercial licence, then I will not convince you of anything.

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