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Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

caddyserver.com

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Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#41

Post by underyx »

StavrosK wrote: post #30
mholt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your feedback. I'd like to know more. > The fact that the headers aren't seen by most non-technical users is moot. Why's that? (And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?) > I find this practice pretty obnoxious to the point of looking at NGINX Plus for commercial use instead. It's good to know that price isn't the bottleneck, then. Does it make any diff…

> 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?

It's enough if nobody but the site maintainers will see them, that's what can annoy them into upgrading.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#42

Post by bauerd »

StavrosK wrote: post #30
mholt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your feedback. I'd like to know more. > The fact that the headers aren't seen by most non-technical users is moot. Why's that? (And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?) > I find this practice pretty obnoxious to the point of looking at NGINX Plus for commercial use instead. It's good to know that price isn't the bottleneck, then. Does it make any diff…

> 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

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#43

Post by nevi-me »

mholt wrote: post #11
winter_blue wrote: post #4

Key Quote: To be clear, this EULA applies only to Caddy binaries you download; it does not apply to the source code. Caddy is still open source, and the source code is under the same Apache 2.0 license. Doesn't this mean that you can simply compile Caddy from source, and avoid having to pay for commercial use? Most Caddy users are likely going be comfortable with compiling stuff, so what benefits does paying bring be…

You're right, you can build from source under the Apache license. Keeping the project truly open source is really important to us, because the community is such a great part of using Caddy. Commercial licenses would only cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year if your organization has at least 160 instances in use. Keep in mind that modifying the source is required to plug in any plugins, which people tend not…

I pay $149 a month for a server, I was using Nginx + nghttp2 (for gRPC), until last month when I switched to Caddy (LE benefits).

I'm not familiar with Go, so I can't modify source to get the plugins I like.

I read the announcement page, and can't find what the cost is, but it doesn't matter. My work doesn't count as non-x, because I want to someday make an extra income from it.

I've found Caddy to be a cool and interesting project, but guess I'll be switching Nginx back on soon enough :(

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#44

Post by mholt »

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.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#45

Post by donatj »

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.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#46

Post by mholt »

jimangel wrote: post #21

I completely understand this direction, and really appreciate the work mholt and team has put into Caddy, but I'm disappointed at the same time. I looked forward to spinning up my dumb ideas tied with commerce using Caddy (on a 0 budget). I've been a Caddy evangelist ever since discovering the powers (auto HTTPS, git webhooks, simple config, etc.), I had plans to write blogs about simple sites for simple ideas that c…

Thanks for your feedback. Really appreciate it.

> Does anyone know if there's significant pain in maintaining a docker image that compiles source code like Caddy on rebuild?

Yes, Cory specifically is looking into the ability to get custom distro packages and containers through our website for our customers.

Totally understand about bootstrapping a business and the costs there. Feel free to contact us: sales@lightcodelabs.com since your business is just starting out and doesn't have any revenue yet, and we'll see about a custom plan that fits you better.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#47

Post by ddevault »

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…

With that statement, Caddy is officially nonfree software. It breaks freedom 1.

Edit: I have been corrected. For the record, I still think this is a braindead move from Caddy.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#48

Post by Bjartr »

mholt wrote: post #28
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…

Thanks for your feedback. I'd like to know more. > The fact that the headers aren't seen by most non-technical users is moot. Why's that? (And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?) > I find this practice pretty obnoxious to the point of looking at NGINX Plus for commercial use instead. It's good to know that price isn't the bottleneck, then. Does it make any diff…

What if, instead of adding headers, you did something more like mobaxterm where there are games that can only be removed by paying for the commercial version. Like all personal caddy servers respond to /nethack?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#49

Post by Whitestrake »

stephenr wrote: post #35

Copied comment from the other HN thread: $50 dollars a MONTH PER INSTANCE for a piece of software that wouldn't even start a few months ago because LetsEncrypt was down. I get that software takes time and people need to eat, but holy shit on a stick. Edit: Oh, and I forgot the part where it also doesn't handle FQDN's properly either. Previous discussion, from when LE was down for a day https://news.ycombinator.com/it…

I think your outburst might be rooted in a misunderstanding.

As stated in a few other places in this thread, the software remains 100% free, including for commercial purposes.

In order to make use of the build server at caddyserver.com, you need to have either a personal or commercial license. The build server provides precompiled binaries with your customized selection of plugins included.

The use of the build server is in no way necessary for the deployment of Caddy in any circumstance.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#50

Post by mholt »

codebeaker wrote: post #27
jimangel wrote: post #21

I completely understand this direction, and really appreciate the work mholt and team has put into Caddy, but I'm disappointed at the same time. I looked forward to spinning up my dumb ideas tied with commerce using Caddy (on a 0 budget). I've been a Caddy evangelist ever since discovering the powers (auto HTTPS, git webhooks, simple config, etc.), I had plans to write blogs about simple sites for simple ideas that c…

I couldn't agree more. The terms seem overly restrictive. Let's hope that they don't "go after" anyone who's not compliant and that this is silently a scheme to force bigger companies into compliance and let the rest of us fly under the radar. As-is, I would owe Caddy $300/month - none of my side projects can sustain that, so I'll be switching back to nginx and some LE cronjobs.

No schemes here, just an updated business plan.

If the current pricing is too restrictive for your business, feel free to build from source (Caddy source code is Apache licensed)!

Or contact us, sales@lightcodelabs.com, if you need a commercial license but your startup / side project has a constrained budget. We'll see if we can work something out for you.

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