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Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

caddyserver.com

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Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#91

Post by Whitestrake »

ddevault wrote: post #87

I said further below that this makes Caddy nonfree, but I was corrected - you can still build Caddy from source, remove the bullshit, and distribute your changes and compiled binaries under Apache 2.0. However, after examining the website more I feel the need to write another comment expressing how poorly this is being handled. The website is very misleading - on the download page, it now asks you to pick a license,…

> The authors are also wasting no time in going after forks[1] to complain about trademark infringement, so if you want to distribute your own patched Caddy builds you can expect to hear from their lawyers. Absolutely devoid of class.

This in particular doesn't seem fair. Trademark really requires trademark holders to make active efforts to preserve their trademarks as soon as they're aware of potential breaches, or they invite risk. And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#92

Post by TAForObvReasons »

ddevault wrote: post #87

I said further below that this makes Caddy nonfree, but I was corrected - you can still build Caddy from source, remove the bullshit, and distribute your changes and compiled binaries under Apache 2.0. However, after examining the website more I feel the need to write another comment expressing how poorly this is being handled. The website is very misleading - on the download page, it now asks you to pick a license,…

> It assumes you understand the Apache 2.0 license and makes no attempt to clarify that businesses can use the open source version.

The authors are absolutely operating in bad faith here. The summary at the top completely omits the case of commercial users building from source, and the language confusion between "use Caddy" vs "use or distribute official Caddy binaries" intentionally tries to confuse the matter.

> Remember that building Caddy from source is still subject to the Apache 2.0 license which requires attribution and stating changes.

This is incorrect. Building Caddy from source and using it in your infrastructure requires no disclosure according to Apache 2. It is only when you decide to embed it in an on-premises version that you sell to customers (who run it on their infrastructure) does the disclosure requirement kick in.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#93

Post by detaro »

jayrox wrote: post #76
andkenneth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the headers are there so they can see if commercial sites are using the personal version and get them to pony up.

commercial sites have the easy ability to go to https://github.com/mholt/caddy ; download the source; remove the header from header.go and server.go; compile; run i'd venture to guess many build the binary themselves already. so they can add their own tweaks. how would anyone be able to prove a website is being ran by caddy if the server doesn't announce that it is caddy?

If you do build it yourself, you don't fall under the commercial license, so it's correct if those are not detected.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#94

Post by AndrewCHM »

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…

peronally, while totally leaving my life unaffected, it'd be one of those thoughts in the back of my head, both knowing that there is some random text being output (need to optimize everything!), and that there is something intentionally uncontrollable there, and to a lesser degree, something there to intentionally bother me.

Can I ask who came up with the idea, and what other alternatives were discussed? Was this requested by the sponsors?

edit: as a further question, if this results in a fork (well, I guess thats a bit late but) or an increase in the number of from-source builds, would you seek to make those two options more difficult? (e.g. legal pressure, or mangling the codebase in some way with hard to acquire dependencies)

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#95

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

Whitestrake wrote: post #91
ddevault wrote: post #87

I said further below that this makes Caddy nonfree, but I was corrected - you can still build Caddy from source, remove the bullshit, and distribute your changes and compiled binaries under Apache 2.0. However, after examining the website more I feel the need to write another comment expressing how poorly this is being handled. The website is very misleading - on the download page, it now asks you to pick a license,…

> The authors are also wasting no time in going after forks[1] to complain about trademark infringement, so if you want to distribute your own patched Caddy builds you can expect to hear from their lawyers. Absolutely devoid of class. This in particular doesn't seem fair. Trademark really requires trademark holders to make active efforts to preserve their trademarks as soon as they're aware of potential breaches, or…

There's not even a registered trademark, as they stated. And simply distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name is absolutely fine and pushing against it is definitely in bad faith.

>And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell.

Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#96

Post by JamesMcMinn »

eropple wrote: post #89
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…

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.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#97

Post by Whitestrake »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #95
Whitestrake wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The authors are also wasting no time in going after forks[1] to complain about trademark infringement, so if you want to distribute your own patched Caddy builds you can expect to hear from their lawyers. Absolutely devoid of class. This in particular doesn't seem fair. Trademark really requires trademark holders to make active efforts to preserve their trademarks as soon as they're aware of potential breaches, or…

There's not even a registered trademark, as they stated. And simply distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name is absolutely fine and pushing against it is definitely in bad faith. >And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell. Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse?

> 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?

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#98

Post by pzb »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #95
Whitestrake wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The authors are also wasting no time in going after forks[1] to complain about trademark infringement, so if you want to distribute your own patched Caddy builds you can expect to hear from their lawyers. Absolutely devoid of class. This in particular doesn't seem fair. Trademark really requires trademark holders to make active efforts to preserve their trademarks as soon as they're aware of potential breaches, or…

There's not even a registered trademark, as they stated. And simply distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name is absolutely fine and pushing against it is definitely in bad faith. >And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell. Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse?

Unfortunately the "distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name" can be problematic from a trademark perspective. This has come up many times before in other projects and led Debian to not use trademarked project names for software. If you are not familiar with the discussions, just search for "IceWeasel".

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#99

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

pzb wrote: post #98
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not even a registered trademark, as they stated. And simply distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name is absolutely fine and pushing against it is definitely in bad faith. >And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell. Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse?

Unfortunately the "distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name" can be problematic from a trademark perspective. This has come up many times before in other projects and led Debian to not use trademarked project names for software. If you are not familiar with the discussions, just search for "IceWeasel".

You're right, I hadn't thought of that. I still think going after a fork within minutes of its establishment for trademark infringement is in very bad faith, though.

Re: Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses

#100

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

Whitestrake wrote: post #97
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not even a registered trademark, as they stated. And simply distributing a modified version of an open source project under that project's name is absolutely fine and pushing against it is definitely in bad faith. >And this is a simple request in the fork's issues page - no lawyers are involved yet, as far as I can tell. Well, what do you think their next step is if they refuse?

> 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.
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