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The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer

215 points by jwcrux 9y ago

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SwellJoe 9y ago
When Caddy made their announcement earlier this week, I shook my head with pity at what they were about to endure. I could have given them a list of all of the shitty (and merely unhelpful) things people were going to say to them, because I've heard them all, too. There's a deep streak of meanness, and, as the post states, entitlement, in the OSS user community (much less so in the developer community, which doesn't overlap as much as it once did, though sometimes developers do it, too). And, the really awful thing is that if the project continues, it'll never stop. Every once in a while someone or some group will get a bee in their bonnet about the thing not being open enough, or the authors not following or not understanding the license (as though the copyright holder needs a license), charging too much for the one little thing they reserve for paying customers (no matter how small that amount is...we charge as little as $6/month, and we still get complaints about price). And, there's always a huge misconception that because an OSS project has a lot of users it must be making a lot of money, especially among the people who won't tolerate any action that would actually make money for the project. What I'm trying to say is that OSS is a hard-as-hell way to make a living (I've done it for my entire professional life, over two decades now), and there's gonna be a handful of users who will make it unpleasant. I love it when I can build some one-off thing and just throw it over the wall onto Github and never think about it again...where I can take a "use it or don't, but don't ask for my time" attitude. Making a business out of an OSS project makes it harder to select good users (who become good customers), though you have to in order to survive.
- zbentley 9y ago
  I agree with everything you said, but couldn't resist: The awful behaviors you see from some users of a previously free-and-open project that went closed (ish) sound an awful like the behaviors of . . . paying customers in pretty much every industry. https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://clientsfromhell.net/ https://clientsfromhell.net/
  - bad_user 9y ago
    Except that users of open source are not paying money and most of them aren't contributing or donating anything either. So the least such users can do is to be nice otherwise gtfo.
    - js2 9y ago
      You'd think that, but OTOH, they haven't invested anything so they have no incentive to be nice. You and I may wish people were nice as a matter of course, but sadly, not so much. :-( (To be clear, I think the really awful users are a just a very vocal minority.)
      - AndyNemmity 9y ago
        Investing doesn't give an incentive to be nice either.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    If they're paying me (or if they're contributing in some way), I'll accept a certain level of belligerence. It's the assholes who think I'm gonna put up with their crap for free that most chap my hide, and I suspect OSS is unique in just how entitled people can be for something they got for free. What's interesting is that people who pay or people who contribute are, on average, nicer to us than the people who don't.
    - js2 9y ago
RomanPushkin 9y ago
FYI, there is no FOSS -- that expression is a misunderstanding. There is the free (libre) software movement, and there is the open source non-movement: two different viewpoints based on different values. See https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for more explanation of the difference between free software and open source. See also https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler for Evgeny Morozov's article on the same point. Regarding the term "FOSS", see https://gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.html https://gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.html
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- arglebarnacle 9y ago
  No doubt many people here are already aware of Richard Stallman and his views about open source software, but needless to say his perspective is the beginning, not the end, of a discussion. It's just wrong to say that that "there is no FOSS" as if you were correcting someone's spelling mistake. The debate about the direction of open source/Libre software is too important to be treated in the way you chose for your post.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Slight addition to your post, RMS isn't really the beginner of free software. He did start GNU, but the idea of free software existed long before him. He is the most well known vocal proponent, of course. He has done much for the movement and this isn't meant to denigrate him. It's just that there was free software proponents before him and he's just the famous one. I'm sure Wikipedia has an article on the history of free software. It should go back at least as far as SHARE, from the 1950s, as I recall. Again, this isn't meant to denigrate RMS, or his work. He's a nice enough fellow. In fact, we went to school together. This is just a bit of a lead for those who wish to look deeper. Actually, I'll get you a link. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_software
zbentley 9y ago
This was pleasantly nuanced and comprehensive. The gamut of reactions to license changes is always a fascinating roller coaster. The "most maintainers have very little to lose" point is one that isn't emphasized often enough. For every famous, high-profile FOSS developer who gives big swaths of their life to their projects, there are dozens or hundreds of people who are: a) contributing stuff they build for their job that they convinced the company to open source (hopefully out of good will, and not out of "maybe community PRs can fix our garbage fire") b) contributing code they wrote while learning something new for personal or professional enrichment, or c) just doing it as a fun activity. The give-your-life-to-a-project folks are important, and prolific. Hats off to them. But so are all those other contributors. They might write less code than the lifers, but their code isn't any worse because they spend fewer hours per week developing it; it just takes longer to get written. And there are a lot more "casual" FOSS developers than lifers. Many FOSS projects started out in that "casual" realm before they became household names today. Sure, a lot of people think some of those casual projects aren't great, but that's not unique to small FOSS projects (cf. systemd). All this is to say: be careful when communicating, especially negatively, with FOSS maintainers. If ethics and basic decency isn't reason enough to treat your fellow humans with compassion, try self-interest: a lot of these people are so un-invested in the projects you depend on for your {fun|living|freedom from the soulless void of the blinking cursor in an empty terminal} that your "How could you be so stupid?" or "Guess this project has gone to hell" comment on their GitHub PR might be enough to make them abandon it entirely. Edit[s]: I accidentally some words and punctuation marks.
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
In some ways, I agree with him; he doesn't owe anybody anything, it's fine to make money on his software, etc. The whole thing still rubs me the wrong way, and I think some of the presented arguments are, to say the least, biased. >> “But then I have to build from source to get what I want.” > Yes… that’s the point. Welcome to open source. > I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want. I trust the author is using LFS or Gentoo, and is personally building his Go toolchain and not using any Google-provided binaries? >> “So I have to pay to remove ads from my web server.” > This was one of the biggest misconceptions. Half-credit, you're both wrong. Users could pay or build themselves to avoid ads. So to a hobbyist who was using Caddy specifically because of the tiny learning curve, this is not a misconception. Thankfully this is a mostly moot point since they took the ads back out. EDIT: Fixed formatting. One day, I will post and not have to fix newlines...
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  Oh, and for bonus points, after telling us that we should just compile it ourselves, he highlights that there is a helpful build server, which "was once open source"... but no, you can't have it; they've closed it up. And even though it was "open source" at one point (his words), "If you find some old source code still online, be aware that no license file was added to the code, and we have not granted others any license to use it." It could be open source or unlicensed, pick one.
  - mholt 9y ago
    You're right, looking again at it, that paragraph is poorly worded. I should have said something more like "the source code was on GitHub" instead of "it was open source".
    - jlgaddis 9y ago
      At the time it was "on GitHub" -- regardless of the presence of a LICENSE file -- was your intention that it be considered and/or treated as "open source"? I don't use Caddy and never have so I'm mostly a disinterested third-party so it doesn't matter to me either way. I'm more curious if you honestly never intended it to be open source or if you're simply using the fact (now, later, when it's convenient) that a LICENSE file was never explicitly included as an "out".
jim-greer 9y ago
This is a great piece. I'll quibble with this bit though: > ...toxicity festers in open source because it’s all too common for forks to ground their motivation in emnity towards other projects. This is wishful thinking, for the most part. Communities don't break off because things are going well. The American Revolution wouldn't have forked if King George had been sympathetic to their needs.
fusiongyro 9y ago
Of course you're going to hear supportive friendly things from your friends. It's much harder to tell someone a hard truth if you see them as your friend and want the best for them. Here's a blunt truth. If it's easy for me to ditch your product, your product has no value. 90% of the comments here on HN amounted to "gee, I guess I have to spend an extra 20 minutes configuring Nginx now." Solving 20 minutes of Nginx configuration is not a viable business. System configuration is handled by some Puppet library author. Who's going to spend $100 on your product so they don't have to spend $20 on a non-free SSL certificate? You're friends with the RethinkDB developers? The moral of their story was even if you have a compelling product, even if you have an interesting niche, even if you give it away for free, even if you give away the source code, even if you have features nobody else has, if you are entering a saturated market you are facing a massive, time-consuming, expensive up-hill battle. Moving away from RethinkDB to Postgres is hard. There are things RethinkDB does that Postgres just doesn't do. But people did this anyway instead of paying, instead of contributing. Moving away from Caddy is simple. Your product barely even exists. That's why you're having trouble making money. Solve a real problem and you'll make real money.
- rapsey 9y ago
  You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. A lot of the time experts don't see a market before someone makes a business out of it. It's obviously not going to be the next big IPO. If he can make some money back for his time however, good for him. If his project is useless, people would not get so upset.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    You miss 100% of shots you make when you aim away from the basket with no ball in your hands too. There is a market for his product. Nginx and Apache already own that market. His differentiator is being easy to install. Puppet et. al. solve ease-of-use for large corporations with the budget. The niche that cares about being easy to install is the niche with no money and nobody to pawn it off on. That niche is also passionate and loud. If he could make some money back for his time, he would already have had a business here. This business idea is essentially selling pre-made cardboard signs to the homeless. If they have the money, they aren't homeless; if they don't, well, they already make their own signs.
ploggingdev 9y ago
I think a significant portion of the hate could have been avoided if mholt made it clear in "The High-Order Bits" section of the original blog post that Caddy is still free to use for commercial purposes if you build from source and also explain that it's possible to remove the response headers. That lack of clarity can be explained by the need to push businesses to pay for a license. This move is often perceived as a dark pattern among hackers who hate it with a passion, as evident in the previous post's HN comments. Having said that, what was particularly disturbing was the amount of hate towards the Caddy team. It's best to explain why think a certain change was "bad"/not in the your best interest and maybe offer suggestions on how to balance the need to build a business without alienating the community that supported the project in the early days. Outright vitriol is not a productive way to further your cause. I guess building a business out of FOSS is as hard as ever.
quickben 9y ago
It depends how you look at it: 1. I would contribute to GCC because it's still "free". 2. I would have contributed to Caddy, but now they are half commercial, so I'm disinclined to provide my "free" to their commercial success. Most decent people that I know would calmly do the same. Most leeching off Caddy will send the vitriol to the author. But, they are not his community, now they are his customers.
- csdreamer7 9y ago
  > It depends how you look at it: 1. I would contribute to GCC because it's still "free". 2. I would have contributed to Caddy, but now they are half commercial, so I'm disinclined to provide my "free" to their commercial success. Your argument would apply to any Apache or BSD licensed code. Not just Caddy. Caddy has used the Apache 2 license for 2 years. Why would you not contribute now vs when the license was committed? Because they are not providing full free builds anymore? The public source code you are contributing to is still free. Nothing would have stopped anyone else from slapping a EULA on a custom Caddy build to sell. It feels like a poor reason to refuse to contribute to an Apache licensed project.
  - kilburn 9y ago
    License isn't everything. An Apache licensed project with no commercial offering will happily incorporate your improvements whenever they meet its quality standards and scope. Now, when the company controlling the upstream project is chafging for the same functionality your patches provide... let's just say ut is going to be harder to contribute them upstream. That's why I find it a no-brainer to invest in and contribute back to open source projects without "paid features available" whereas I will avoid the same project when they do. Projects where maintainers get money through support contracts are fine for me, although a similar argument may be made regarding the project's documentation/easiness of configuration.
    - Whitestrake 9y ago
      > Now, when the company controlling the upstream project is chafging for the same functionality your patches provide... It's important to correct this statement, which is either disingenuous or just incorrect. Light Code Labs is not charging its users for the functionality of the Caddy server. They are charging its users to provide pre-compiled binaries with optional customization in the form of a selection of plugins and server types. Don't conflate binaries distributed under EULA via the build server at caddyserver.com with the actual functionality of the (still 100% free) software. You're welcome to (not) contribute and (not) benefit, at your leisure. As the actual post linked by OP states, the maintainers tried support contracts. Nobody bought them, so it wasn't sustainable. Their options were to look for other solutions or stop maintaining the project. You may or may not prefer that they abandoned it instead, but they made a choice.
rmrfrmrf 9y ago
I think the main problem is that the original announcement read more like a ransom note than a press release. IMO the author doesn't realize how much price factors into tech stack decisions, or how the majority of his users are developers who now have the new responsibility of creating business cases for a piece of software (or scramble to find a replacement) that need to go through approval, or the projects that now have to be delayed to switch around one framework on the back end (I can just see the looks of manager/PM faces everywhere when they get the news from one of their devs). The tone is another big issue. Flippant phrases like "what's new for personal edition users? Not much" isn't going to get any laughs after talking about mandatory payment. Other times, the disdain for users seeps from the wording (like the passive-aggressive "reminder" that internal apps constitute commercial use). I'd really encourage the author to go back and re-read that announcement as a user who has taken a gamble on your software and is now invested in it. Yes, this might be a completely necessary move for the survival of Caddy. The necessity, though, doesn't mean you can skip the formalities. Users still need to be sold on the idea.
- avaer 9y ago
  Users don't need to be sold on the idea. They already bought. This is like buying something with your credit card, happily using it, and then getting upset by the charge on the corporate card at the end of the month. As a competent software professional you know the stakes of using free software. The professional users will pay for the software they're using, or accept the consequences of the tech decisions they made. Maybe the release wording sucked, but software vendors shouldn't be on the hook to sell you the thing you already bought.
  - rmrfrmrf 9y ago
    That's an interesting thought process. How, though, does paying $0 up-front for something that costs $0 put you on the hook to later be charged any price the vendor wishes? And what makes this different from a $5 purchase? If I buy a hot dog from a street vendor, I certainly wouldn't expect to see another $10 charge from him 6 months later just because he felt like he should have charged more at the time.
z3t4 9y ago
Software licensing is damn hard. When it come to certain tools people wont use them if they are not open source or don't get active maintenance. But they are also willing to pay for it.
sah2ed 9y ago
> Comments started rolling in, but I had class until almost noon. With me in class and Cory at his day job, it was impossible to coordinate any responses until much later that day. The quote above clearly shows a huge oversight -- there were no plans in place to block out time to do PR after the announcement. Better to schedule the announcement to coincide with a period when the co-founders would be able clarify the public's perception of the changes. Even for OSS projects, marketing is important. But that's not even the underlying issue. There is a subtle but very important observation that the OP's article didn't touch and I think will help illuminate why the seemly small changes to Caddy lead to the outburst of entitlement and vitriol directed at Matt and Cory. Humans are naturally loss averse[0] this is why there is an enormous difference between marketing copy that says "a $5 discount" versus saying "avoid a $5 surcharge". The original announcement[2] was framed[1] like a loss -- existing users should prepare to deal with previously non-existent advertising of Caddy's sponsors -- causing the human instinct of loss aversion to kick in in full force. This will always happen whenever you switch your user/customer interaction from social to market norms [3] which is essentially what it means to monetize an OSS project. Better to keep a free product unchanged then create a separate product targeted at commercial users [4] to avoid alienating your free users, or incurring their wrath. Engineers are generally skeptical of marketing but this is one of those situations when good marketing would have helped to put out fires. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) [2] https://caddyserver.com/blog/accouncing-caddy-commercial-licenses https://caddyserver.com/blog/accouncing-caddy-commercial-lic... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419923/social-vs-market-norms-at-reddit/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419923/social-vs-market-n... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation
JepZ 9y ago
Well, I barely knew Caddy (had to google it again), but after reading the "Ugly" section I am sure I will not become a caddy user anytime soon. I mean we all know how brutal (emotionally) online communities can be and I respect anybody who stands against it. Nevertheless, I do not think that 'Entitlement' and 'Emotional Manipulation' are the real problems here, because those are just honest expressions of what other people think. Those comments are some kind of feedback which the maintainer can accept or ignore. On the other hand, there are a lot of dicussions where we have personal assaults, like 'the maintainer is a prick' or 'what a dumb move'. Those are totally unacceptable and the people discussion should show what they think about such comments. And in the end, HN has a very heterogenous group of commenters, but Paul Graham gave us a guide on how to write good comments: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Oh, boo-hoo. I maintain a bunch of FOSS projects too and I endure entitlement too, and I yet was still there calling you out for this. What Caddy has done is deliberately mislead and disrespect both new and established users. Other groups have added commercial licensing options to their software without facing (as much) vitrol because they didn't mislead or disrespect people while doing so. Don't think Caddy is in the same league as them. You got hate because you did it wrong, not because you did it at all. Your post is mining for sympathy because you got hate for being a jerk and it demonstrates that you've learned little from the event. You may not owe your users anything, but guess what: they don't owe you anything either. That's how open source works.
- watwut 9y ago
  The world and oss especially would be much better place if people were able to criticise without being so emotional about it (the hate and personal attacks part). It is like, every other issue leads to blow up of emotions.
- rocqua 9y ago
  You may not owe your users anything, but guess what: they don't owe you anything either. That's how open source works. Yep, that is how open source works. Note the 'source' there? Anyone is free to charge for compiled binaries. If this compilation has added bonuses (e.g. including plugins) that gives people a reason to pay for that compilation. In any case, those that don't like it can just compile the project themselves. What exactly do you think was misleading about this move?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    You're right but you lack context about what's wrong with the Caddy change. I wrote up my concerns in detail in the original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15238969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15238969
    - rocqua 9y ago
      How does the trademark stuff interact with distributions potentially providing binaries via their package managers?
throwaway0071 9y ago
Caddy's mholt holds some similarities to Docker's shykes in that both lack business and open source acumen.
aorth 9y ago
> (Is anyone offended that you can’t remove nginx’s Server self-promotional header without an extra module?) Wait a second. The Caddy developers implemented a premium "thank you" feature that embeds their sponsors' company names in the HTTP headers of the binary distribution[0], and then defends this by complaining that you can't disable nginx from simply printing a header that says "server: nginx"? It's not even remotely the same thing! I think this was a very poor use of judgement. I don't even see why it's relevant that they asked their sponsors "do you want us to put your names in the HTTP headers of all the poor suckers running the binary builds?" There's a handful of other places that would be way more appropriate for spamming sponsors' names, for example: banner on the website, in the log files, on the download page, in the README, etc. [0] https://github.com/mholt/caddy/pull/1866 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/pull/1866
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  The biggest rub for me was the intentional misdirection regarding the Apache 2 License. As a web server, the only attribution required is to the person or entity who is deploying the server, not to the people accessing the website! (To be clear on that point, the actual web server software is running on the server end, not on the user end; this is in contrast with a JS library that runs in the web browser) I think the authors either fundamentally misunderstand the requirements (in which case they should find a lawyer) or they are intentionally misleading readers (in which case they are acting in bad faith and deserve contempt)
strken 9y ago
As someone who was going to switch a few personal projects to Caddy this weekend, and who read through both the initial announcement and this, I am now massively confused by the whole thing and have no idea what users are actually allowed to do. Is "sudo apt-get install caddy" allowed? Does header advertising mean "Server: caddy" or "X-Advertisement: go to www.malicious.com for camgirls"? Is this indicative of a broader move to stop supporting the open source version? If I had previously installed Caddy through a package manager that grabbed the official binaries, and I updated my system, would I now be breaching an EULA that I never saw? And so on. Obviously I am not entitled to get anything for free and don't use the software anyway, and I can probably find answers after 10 minutes on the Caddy website, but this seems like a communications issue that might have made people angry - particularly if they thought they would have to immediately migrate back to nginx with zero notice.
- djhworld 9y ago
  I don't believe there are any Caddy packages in the main repos. You have to download and install it yourself, or create your own .deb (correct me if I am wrong) In terms of the header, that change was reverted a few days ago
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  The caddy source code is licensed under the Apache License. As a user, you can modify and/or use the software in pretty much any way you see fit -- as long as you download the source and build it yourself. You can add or remove features (including the controversial header) and use it as you wish, but redistributing modified versions and calling them "caddy" may not be permitted. Binary packages from your distro should also be fine. If you download and use the binaries from the caddy web site, you are bound by their EULA. To be safe, use the version provided by your distro or -- even better -- build it from source yourself. You may want to read the actual Apache License [0] yourself, skim over the "Licensing conditions" section [1] of the Wikipedia page, or, at the least, review GitHub's bullet points [2]. [0]: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License#Licensing_conditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License#Licensing_condi... [2]: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
chriscappuccio 9y ago
Every popular project gets this kind of crap. The best response is to push back on these entitled fools. I don't see how this is a better business model for Caddy than donations (which didn't work.) This is still basically a donation model, since they are not creating a separate closed-source edition. This is a way to automatically solicit for donations, making them look more like licenses. Why is a new web server so important that there were going to be commercial users paying for it over established alternatives. When I saw that it was written in Go and replete with the latest buzzwords, I realized that this was written for ninjas. The intersection of ninjas plus commercial users may be too small for a business. (I hope I'm wrong for the author's sake)
edwhitesell 9y ago
I find it amusuing when I tried to load the site I get a 429 "Too many requests" nginx error.
- mholt 9y ago
  That's the Discourse container... Sigh.
  - edwhitesell 9y ago
    Ah, OK. Well understandable then. Unless that could be obscured with a reverse proxy or something.
type0 9y ago
This is quite an interesting tread about packaging Caddy: https://caddy.community/t/packaging-caddy/61/8 https://caddy.community/t/packaging-caddy/61/8 and provides some insights into his thinking about builds whether you agree with him or not.
zizek23 9y ago
No one is forcing anyone to release an open source project or make anything available for free. It's a choice. There are entitled, selfish and extremely immature users but also projects. Open source users frequently put up with extremely poor products in the beginning and help them mature and grow. In the case of users some are frequently on HN itself complaining if a project repo on github is not updated in a week. There are startups who are successful who let alone give anything back to open source projects do not even properly acknowledge their use. This is hand waved away on HN when it should be the leading force of change against this kind of self serving culture. Users pay you with their attention, that is the currency of open source and adds tangible value to your project in the beginning when you have no users. So projects like Caddy have been paid and validated by their users which enables them to now make a commercial push. Once you gain traction you can't suddenly change the rules of the game and change the narrative to 'free' and 'paid' users or 'developers' and be dismissive of users who supported you. Yet when even projects like Debian dismiss users to focus on developers now that they have traction, nevermind a project without users has no reason to exist, its not surprising this is the predominant dismissive attitude in open source towards users.
makecheck 9y ago
There has been this assumption that software is "free" for so long that many people must assume it is nearly trivial to create and maintain. Perhaps every download page should have a preamble reminding people how many staff, how many collective years of effort, and how many dollars for laptops, web hosting, etc. went into what they are about to use. Perhaps every "./configure && make" should print a similar dump to the terminal. Put it front and center, clue people in.
stordoff 9y ago
FWIW, the changes to Caddy mean I won't be using it going forward. * I'm not going to build from source - the key differentior for me was that Caddy was _simple_. If I need to build from source, that goes away. ("I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want" misses the point IMO - a key selling point of Caddy was HTTP2/SSL with minimal configuration, attracting people far beyond the "open source community"). * The promotional header is a non-starter for me. My current site very deliberately shows no ads and relies on as few external services/resources as possible, so I'm not happy embedding an ad in every request (I know it has been reverted, but it's still shown on https://caddyserver.com/pricing https://caddyserver.com/pricing which would make me concerned about it coming back). * The personal/commercial licence split is something I don't want to have to worry about. Currently the personal licence is fine, but what if I decide to add ads to get a few pounds a month back? It's not something I really want to have to think about. * Pricing - I would consider paying to avoid the header/concerns about personal/commercial split, but starting at $1200/year (billed annually) is a complete non-starter. It's nowhere near what I could afford, but I'm also not seeing why you would pay that - basic email support doesn't seem compelling, there are no additional features over the free version, and it seems any company who could afford to pay it would also be in a place to build from source (or pay for an nginx consultant and get a comparable feature set). Of course the Caddy devs are entitled to make these changes, but they make it into something I don't want to use. Two other quick points while I'm here: * Brand guidelines of "Please do not call it Caddy Server" seem strange when the main domain is caddyserver.com * Linking to an EULA (from the footer of caddyserver.com) that contains e.g. "{{if eq .Type "personal"}}" is less than useful.
CoreXtreme 9y ago
1. Dealing with paying customers is actually worse than this. Unless, of course, you have an army of lawyers. 2. You initially sold people on this project. That's what got your project enough eyeballs in the first place for you to even consider making it a business. 3. Of course, your acquaintance will not complain - that's precisely the reason they are still with you. As you got upset when people told you of your unfairness. It's such a pity that these days people don't even have friends who can tell them the truth to their face. 4. OSS as requires a certain spirit. The OSS project is being sold on a set of ideas which is exactly opposite of the commercial world - that's why they use and contribute to your product. 5. Maybe you are too poor to be an open source contributor, I suggest getting a job and not expecting to make money by flipping the board. That will get you more fame and respect. That said, now playing victim will not help you.

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SwellJoe 9y ago

When Caddy made their announcement earlier this week, I shook my head with pity at what they were about to endure. I could have given them a list of all of the shitty (and merely unhelpful) things people were going to say to them, because I've heard them all, too. There's a deep streak of meanness, and, as the post states, entitlement, in the OSS user community (much less so in the developer community, which doesn't overlap as much as it once did, though sometimes developers do it, too). And, the really awful thing is that if the project continues, it'll never stop. Every once in a while someone or some group will get a bee in their bonnet about the thing not being open enough, or the authors not following or not understanding the license (as though the copyright holder needs a license), charging too much for the one little thing they reserve for paying customers (no matter how small that amount is...we charge as little as $6/month, and we still get complaints about price). And, there's always a huge misconception that because an OSS project has a lot of users it must be making a lot of money, especially among the people who won't tolerate any action that would actually make money for the project. What I'm trying to say is that OSS is a hard-as-hell way to make a living (I've done it for my entire professional life, over two decades now), and there's gonna be a handful of users who will make it unpleasant. I love it when I can build some one-off thing and just throw it over the wall onto Github and never think about it again...where I can take a "use it or don't, but don't ask for my time" attitude. Making a business out of an OSS project makes it harder to select good users (who become good customers), though you have to in order to survive.

zbentley 9y ago
I agree with everything you said, but couldn't resist: The awful behaviors you see from some users of a previously free-and-open project that went closed (ish) sound an awful like the behaviors of . . . paying customers in pretty much every industry. https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://clientsfromhell.net/ https://clientsfromhell.net/
- bad_user 9y ago
  Except that users of open source are not paying money and most of them aren't contributing or donating anything either. So the least such users can do is to be nice otherwise gtfo.
  - js2 9y ago
    You'd think that, but OTOH, they haven't invested anything so they have no incentive to be nice. You and I may wish people were nice as a matter of course, but sadly, not so much. :-( (To be clear, I think the really awful users are a just a very vocal minority.)
    - AndyNemmity 9y ago
      Investing doesn't give an incentive to be nice either.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  If they're paying me (or if they're contributing in some way), I'll accept a certain level of belligerence. It's the assholes who think I'm gonna put up with their crap for free that most chap my hide, and I suspect OSS is unique in just how entitled people can be for something they got for free. What's interesting is that people who pay or people who contribute are, on average, nicer to us than the people who don't.
  - js2 9y ago

RomanPushkin 9y ago

FYI, there is no FOSS -- that expression is a misunderstanding. There is the free (libre) software movement, and there is the open source non-movement: two different viewpoints based on different values. See https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for more explanation of the difference between free software and open source. See also https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler for Evgeny Morozov's article on the same point. Regarding the term "FOSS", see https://gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.html https://gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.html

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
arglebarnacle 9y ago
No doubt many people here are already aware of Richard Stallman and his views about open source software, but needless to say his perspective is the beginning, not the end, of a discussion. It's just wrong to say that that "there is no FOSS" as if you were correcting someone's spelling mistake. The debate about the direction of open source/Libre software is too important to be treated in the way you chose for your post.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Slight addition to your post, RMS isn't really the beginner of free software. He did start GNU, but the idea of free software existed long before him. He is the most well known vocal proponent, of course. He has done much for the movement and this isn't meant to denigrate him. It's just that there was free software proponents before him and he's just the famous one. I'm sure Wikipedia has an article on the history of free software. It should go back at least as far as SHARE, from the 1950s, as I recall. Again, this isn't meant to denigrate RMS, or his work. He's a nice enough fellow. In fact, we went to school together. This is just a bit of a lead for those who wish to look deeper. Actually, I'll get you a link. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_software

zbentley 9y ago

This was pleasantly nuanced and comprehensive. The gamut of reactions to license changes is always a fascinating roller coaster. The "most maintainers have very little to lose" point is one that isn't emphasized often enough. For every famous, high-profile FOSS developer who gives big swaths of their life to their projects, there are dozens or hundreds of people who are: a) contributing stuff they build for their job that they convinced the company to open source (hopefully out of good will, and not out of "maybe community PRs can fix our garbage fire") b) contributing code they wrote while learning something new for personal or professional enrichment, or c) just doing it as a fun activity. The give-your-life-to-a-project folks are important, and prolific. Hats off to them. But so are all those other contributors. They might write less code than the lifers, but their code isn't any worse because they spend fewer hours per week developing it; it just takes longer to get written. And there are a lot more "casual" FOSS developers than lifers. Many FOSS projects started out in that "casual" realm before they became household names today. Sure, a lot of people think some of those casual projects aren't great, but that's not unique to small FOSS projects (cf. systemd). All this is to say: be careful when communicating, especially negatively, with FOSS maintainers. If ethics and basic decency isn't reason enough to treat your fellow humans with compassion, try self-interest: a lot of these people are so un-invested in the projects you depend on for your {fun|living|freedom from the soulless void of the blinking cursor in an empty terminal} that your "How could you be so stupid?" or "Guess this project has gone to hell" comment on their GitHub PR might be enough to make them abandon it entirely. Edit[s]: I accidentally some words and punctuation marks.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago

In some ways, I agree with him; he doesn't owe anybody anything, it's fine to make money on his software, etc. The whole thing still rubs me the wrong way, and I think some of the presented arguments are, to say the least, biased. >> “But then I have to build from source to get what I want.” > Yes… that’s the point. Welcome to open source. > I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want. I trust the author is using LFS or Gentoo, and is personally building his Go toolchain and not using any Google-provided binaries? >> “So I have to pay to remove ads from my web server.” > This was one of the biggest misconceptions. Half-credit, you're both wrong. Users could pay or build themselves to avoid ads. So to a hobbyist who was using Caddy specifically because of the tiny learning curve, this is not a misconception. Thankfully this is a mostly moot point since they took the ads back out. EDIT: Fixed formatting. One day, I will post and not have to fix newlines...

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
Oh, and for bonus points, after telling us that we should just compile it ourselves, he highlights that there is a helpful build server, which "was once open source"... but no, you can't have it; they've closed it up. And even though it was "open source" at one point (his words), "If you find some old source code still online, be aware that no license file was added to the code, and we have not granted others any license to use it." It could be open source or unlicensed, pick one.
- mholt 9y ago
  You're right, looking again at it, that paragraph is poorly worded. I should have said something more like "the source code was on GitHub" instead of "it was open source".
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    At the time it was "on GitHub" -- regardless of the presence of a LICENSE file -- was your intention that it be considered and/or treated as "open source"? I don't use Caddy and never have so I'm mostly a disinterested third-party so it doesn't matter to me either way. I'm more curious if you honestly never intended it to be open source or if you're simply using the fact (now, later, when it's convenient) that a LICENSE file was never explicitly included as an "out".

jim-greer 9y ago

This is a great piece. I'll quibble with this bit though: > ...toxicity festers in open source because it’s all too common for forks to ground their motivation in emnity towards other projects. This is wishful thinking, for the most part. Communities don't break off because things are going well. The American Revolution wouldn't have forked if King George had been sympathetic to their needs.

fusiongyro 9y ago

Of course you're going to hear supportive friendly things from your friends. It's much harder to tell someone a hard truth if you see them as your friend and want the best for them. Here's a blunt truth. If it's easy for me to ditch your product, your product has no value. 90% of the comments here on HN amounted to "gee, I guess I have to spend an extra 20 minutes configuring Nginx now." Solving 20 minutes of Nginx configuration is not a viable business. System configuration is handled by some Puppet library author. Who's going to spend $100 on your product so they don't have to spend $20 on a non-free SSL certificate? You're friends with the RethinkDB developers? The moral of their story was even if you have a compelling product, even if you have an interesting niche, even if you give it away for free, even if you give away the source code, even if you have features nobody else has, if you are entering a saturated market you are facing a massive, time-consuming, expensive up-hill battle. Moving away from RethinkDB to Postgres is hard. There are things RethinkDB does that Postgres just doesn't do. But people did this anyway instead of paying, instead of contributing. Moving away from Caddy is simple. Your product barely even exists. That's why you're having trouble making money. Solve a real problem and you'll make real money.

rapsey 9y ago
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. A lot of the time experts don't see a market before someone makes a business out of it. It's obviously not going to be the next big IPO. If he can make some money back for his time however, good for him. If his project is useless, people would not get so upset.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  You miss 100% of shots you make when you aim away from the basket with no ball in your hands too. There is a market for his product. Nginx and Apache already own that market. His differentiator is being easy to install. Puppet et. al. solve ease-of-use for large corporations with the budget. The niche that cares about being easy to install is the niche with no money and nobody to pawn it off on. That niche is also passionate and loud. If he could make some money back for his time, he would already have had a business here. This business idea is essentially selling pre-made cardboard signs to the homeless. If they have the money, they aren't homeless; if they don't, well, they already make their own signs.

ploggingdev 9y ago

I think a significant portion of the hate could have been avoided if mholt made it clear in "The High-Order Bits" section of the original blog post that Caddy is still free to use for commercial purposes if you build from source and also explain that it's possible to remove the response headers. That lack of clarity can be explained by the need to push businesses to pay for a license. This move is often perceived as a dark pattern among hackers who hate it with a passion, as evident in the previous post's HN comments. Having said that, what was particularly disturbing was the amount of hate towards the Caddy team. It's best to explain why think a certain change was "bad"/not in the your best interest and maybe offer suggestions on how to balance the need to build a business without alienating the community that supported the project in the early days. Outright vitriol is not a productive way to further your cause. I guess building a business out of FOSS is as hard as ever.

quickben 9y ago

It depends how you look at it: 1. I would contribute to GCC because it's still "free". 2. I would have contributed to Caddy, but now they are half commercial, so I'm disinclined to provide my "free" to their commercial success. Most decent people that I know would calmly do the same. Most leeching off Caddy will send the vitriol to the author. But, they are not his community, now they are his customers.

csdreamer7 9y ago
> It depends how you look at it: 1. I would contribute to GCC because it's still "free". 2. I would have contributed to Caddy, but now they are half commercial, so I'm disinclined to provide my "free" to their commercial success. Your argument would apply to any Apache or BSD licensed code. Not just Caddy. Caddy has used the Apache 2 license for 2 years. Why would you not contribute now vs when the license was committed? Because they are not providing full free builds anymore? The public source code you are contributing to is still free. Nothing would have stopped anyone else from slapping a EULA on a custom Caddy build to sell. It feels like a poor reason to refuse to contribute to an Apache licensed project.
- kilburn 9y ago
  License isn't everything. An Apache licensed project with no commercial offering will happily incorporate your improvements whenever they meet its quality standards and scope. Now, when the company controlling the upstream project is chafging for the same functionality your patches provide... let's just say ut is going to be harder to contribute them upstream. That's why I find it a no-brainer to invest in and contribute back to open source projects without "paid features available" whereas I will avoid the same project when they do. Projects where maintainers get money through support contracts are fine for me, although a similar argument may be made regarding the project's documentation/easiness of configuration.
  - Whitestrake 9y ago
    > Now, when the company controlling the upstream project is chafging for the same functionality your patches provide... It's important to correct this statement, which is either disingenuous or just incorrect. Light Code Labs is not charging its users for the functionality of the Caddy server. They are charging its users to provide pre-compiled binaries with optional customization in the form of a selection of plugins and server types. Don't conflate binaries distributed under EULA via the build server at caddyserver.com with the actual functionality of the (still 100% free) software. You're welcome to (not) contribute and (not) benefit, at your leisure. As the actual post linked by OP states, the maintainers tried support contracts. Nobody bought them, so it wasn't sustainable. Their options were to look for other solutions or stop maintaining the project. You may or may not prefer that they abandoned it instead, but they made a choice.

rmrfrmrf 9y ago

I think the main problem is that the original announcement read more like a ransom note than a press release. IMO the author doesn't realize how much price factors into tech stack decisions, or how the majority of his users are developers who now have the new responsibility of creating business cases for a piece of software (or scramble to find a replacement) that need to go through approval, or the projects that now have to be delayed to switch around one framework on the back end (I can just see the looks of manager/PM faces everywhere when they get the news from one of their devs). The tone is another big issue. Flippant phrases like "what's new for personal edition users? Not much" isn't going to get any laughs after talking about mandatory payment. Other times, the disdain for users seeps from the wording (like the passive-aggressive "reminder" that internal apps constitute commercial use). I'd really encourage the author to go back and re-read that announcement as a user who has taken a gamble on your software and is now invested in it. Yes, this might be a completely necessary move for the survival of Caddy. The necessity, though, doesn't mean you can skip the formalities. Users still need to be sold on the idea.

avaer 9y ago
Users don't need to be sold on the idea. They already bought. This is like buying something with your credit card, happily using it, and then getting upset by the charge on the corporate card at the end of the month. As a competent software professional you know the stakes of using free software. The professional users will pay for the software they're using, or accept the consequences of the tech decisions they made. Maybe the release wording sucked, but software vendors shouldn't be on the hook to sell you the thing you already bought.
- rmrfrmrf 9y ago
  That's an interesting thought process. How, though, does paying $0 up-front for something that costs $0 put you on the hook to later be charged any price the vendor wishes? And what makes this different from a $5 purchase? If I buy a hot dog from a street vendor, I certainly wouldn't expect to see another $10 charge from him 6 months later just because he felt like he should have charged more at the time.

z3t4 9y ago

Software licensing is damn hard. When it come to certain tools people wont use them if they are not open source or don't get active maintenance. But they are also willing to pay for it.

sah2ed 9y ago

> Comments started rolling in, but I had class until almost noon. With me in class and Cory at his day job, it was impossible to coordinate any responses until much later that day. The quote above clearly shows a huge oversight -- there were no plans in place to block out time to do PR after the announcement. Better to schedule the announcement to coincide with a period when the co-founders would be able clarify the public's perception of the changes. Even for OSS projects, marketing is important. But that's not even the underlying issue. There is a subtle but very important observation that the OP's article didn't touch and I think will help illuminate why the seemly small changes to Caddy lead to the outburst of entitlement and vitriol directed at Matt and Cory. Humans are naturally loss averse[0] this is why there is an enormous difference between marketing copy that says "a $5 discount" versus saying "avoid a $5 surcharge". The original announcement[2] was framed[1] like a loss -- existing users should prepare to deal with previously non-existent advertising of Caddy's sponsors -- causing the human instinct of loss aversion to kick in in full force. This will always happen whenever you switch your user/customer interaction from social to market norms [3] which is essentially what it means to monetize an OSS project. Better to keep a free product unchanged then create a separate product targeted at commercial users [4] to avoid alienating your free users, or incurring their wrath. Engineers are generally skeptical of marketing but this is one of those situations when good marketing would have helped to put out fires. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) [2] https://caddyserver.com/blog/accouncing-caddy-commercial-licenses https://caddyserver.com/blog/accouncing-caddy-commercial-lic... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419923/social-vs-market-norms-at-reddit/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419923/social-vs-market-n... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_differentiation

JepZ 9y ago

Well, I barely knew Caddy (had to google it again), but after reading the "Ugly" section I am sure I will not become a caddy user anytime soon. I mean we all know how brutal (emotionally) online communities can be and I respect anybody who stands against it. Nevertheless, I do not think that 'Entitlement' and 'Emotional Manipulation' are the real problems here, because those are just honest expressions of what other people think. Those comments are some kind of feedback which the maintainer can accept or ignore. On the other hand, there are a lot of dicussions where we have personal assaults, like 'the maintainer is a prick' or 'what a dumb move'. Those are totally unacceptable and the people discussion should show what they think about such comments. And in the end, HN has a very heterogenous group of commenters, but Paul Graham gave us a guide on how to write good comments: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Oh, boo-hoo. I maintain a bunch of FOSS projects too and I endure entitlement too, and I yet was still there calling you out for this. What Caddy has done is deliberately mislead and disrespect both new and established users. Other groups have added commercial licensing options to their software without facing (as much) vitrol because they didn't mislead or disrespect people while doing so. Don't think Caddy is in the same league as them. You got hate because you did it wrong, not because you did it at all. Your post is mining for sympathy because you got hate for being a jerk and it demonstrates that you've learned little from the event. You may not owe your users anything, but guess what: they don't owe you anything either. That's how open source works.

watwut 9y ago
The world and oss especially would be much better place if people were able to criticise without being so emotional about it (the hate and personal attacks part). It is like, every other issue leads to blow up of emotions.
rocqua 9y ago
You may not owe your users anything, but guess what: they don't owe you anything either. That's how open source works. Yep, that is how open source works. Note the 'source' there? Anyone is free to charge for compiled binaries. If this compilation has added bonuses (e.g. including plugins) that gives people a reason to pay for that compilation. In any case, those that don't like it can just compile the project themselves. What exactly do you think was misleading about this move?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  You're right but you lack context about what's wrong with the Caddy change. I wrote up my concerns in detail in the original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15238969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15238969
  - rocqua 9y ago
    How does the trademark stuff interact with distributions potentially providing binaries via their package managers?

throwaway0071 9y ago

Caddy's mholt holds some similarities to Docker's shykes in that both lack business and open source acumen.

aorth 9y ago

> (Is anyone offended that you can’t remove nginx’s Server self-promotional header without an extra module?) Wait a second. The Caddy developers implemented a premium "thank you" feature that embeds their sponsors' company names in the HTTP headers of the binary distribution[0], and then defends this by complaining that you can't disable nginx from simply printing a header that says "server: nginx"? It's not even remotely the same thing! I think this was a very poor use of judgement. I don't even see why it's relevant that they asked their sponsors "do you want us to put your names in the HTTP headers of all the poor suckers running the binary builds?" There's a handful of other places that would be way more appropriate for spamming sponsors' names, for example: banner on the website, in the log files, on the download page, in the README, etc. [0] https://github.com/mholt/caddy/pull/1866 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/pull/1866

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
The biggest rub for me was the intentional misdirection regarding the Apache 2 License. As a web server, the only attribution required is to the person or entity who is deploying the server, not to the people accessing the website! (To be clear on that point, the actual web server software is running on the server end, not on the user end; this is in contrast with a JS library that runs in the web browser) I think the authors either fundamentally misunderstand the requirements (in which case they should find a lawyer) or they are intentionally misleading readers (in which case they are acting in bad faith and deserve contempt)

strken 9y ago

As someone who was going to switch a few personal projects to Caddy this weekend, and who read through both the initial announcement and this, I am now massively confused by the whole thing and have no idea what users are actually allowed to do. Is "sudo apt-get install caddy" allowed? Does header advertising mean "Server: caddy" or "X-Advertisement: go to www.malicious.com for camgirls"? Is this indicative of a broader move to stop supporting the open source version? If I had previously installed Caddy through a package manager that grabbed the official binaries, and I updated my system, would I now be breaching an EULA that I never saw? And so on. Obviously I am not entitled to get anything for free and don't use the software anyway, and I can probably find answers after 10 minutes on the Caddy website, but this seems like a communications issue that might have made people angry - particularly if they thought they would have to immediately migrate back to nginx with zero notice.

djhworld 9y ago
I don't believe there are any Caddy packages in the main repos. You have to download and install it yourself, or create your own .deb (correct me if I am wrong) In terms of the header, that change was reverted a few days ago
jlgaddis 9y ago
The caddy source code is licensed under the Apache License. As a user, you can modify and/or use the software in pretty much any way you see fit -- as long as you download the source and build it yourself. You can add or remove features (including the controversial header) and use it as you wish, but redistributing modified versions and calling them "caddy" may not be permitted. Binary packages from your distro should also be fine. If you download and use the binaries from the caddy web site, you are bound by their EULA. To be safe, use the version provided by your distro or -- even better -- build it from source yourself. You may want to read the actual Apache License [0] yourself, skim over the "Licensing conditions" section [1] of the Wikipedia page, or, at the least, review GitHub's bullet points [2]. [0]: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License#Licensing_conditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License#Licensing_condi... [2]: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

chriscappuccio 9y ago

Every popular project gets this kind of crap. The best response is to push back on these entitled fools. I don't see how this is a better business model for Caddy than donations (which didn't work.) This is still basically a donation model, since they are not creating a separate closed-source edition. This is a way to automatically solicit for donations, making them look more like licenses. Why is a new web server so important that there were going to be commercial users paying for it over established alternatives. When I saw that it was written in Go and replete with the latest buzzwords, I realized that this was written for ninjas. The intersection of ninjas plus commercial users may be too small for a business. (I hope I'm wrong for the author's sake)

edwhitesell 9y ago

I find it amusuing when I tried to load the site I get a 429 "Too many requests" nginx error.

mholt 9y ago
That's the Discourse container... Sigh.
- edwhitesell 9y ago
  Ah, OK. Well understandable then. Unless that could be obscured with a reverse proxy or something.

type0 9y ago

This is quite an interesting tread about packaging Caddy: https://caddy.community/t/packaging-caddy/61/8 https://caddy.community/t/packaging-caddy/61/8 and provides some insights into his thinking about builds whether you agree with him or not.

zizek23 9y ago

No one is forcing anyone to release an open source project or make anything available for free. It's a choice. There are entitled, selfish and extremely immature users but also projects. Open source users frequently put up with extremely poor products in the beginning and help them mature and grow. In the case of users some are frequently on HN itself complaining if a project repo on github is not updated in a week. There are startups who are successful who let alone give anything back to open source projects do not even properly acknowledge their use. This is hand waved away on HN when it should be the leading force of change against this kind of self serving culture. Users pay you with their attention, that is the currency of open source and adds tangible value to your project in the beginning when you have no users. So projects like Caddy have been paid and validated by their users which enables them to now make a commercial push. Once you gain traction you can't suddenly change the rules of the game and change the narrative to 'free' and 'paid' users or 'developers' and be dismissive of users who supported you. Yet when even projects like Debian dismiss users to focus on developers now that they have traction, nevermind a project without users has no reason to exist, its not surprising this is the predominant dismissive attitude in open source towards users.

makecheck 9y ago

There has been this assumption that software is "free" for so long that many people must assume it is nearly trivial to create and maintain. Perhaps every download page should have a preamble reminding people how many staff, how many collective years of effort, and how many dollars for laptops, web hosting, etc. went into what they are about to use. Perhaps every "./configure && make" should print a similar dump to the terminal. Put it front and center, clue people in.

stordoff 9y ago

FWIW, the changes to Caddy mean I won't be using it going forward. * I'm not going to build from source - the key differentior for me was that Caddy was _simple_. If I need to build from source, that goes away. ("I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want" misses the point IMO - a key selling point of Caddy was HTTP2/SSL with minimal configuration, attracting people far beyond the "open source community"). * The promotional header is a non-starter for me. My current site very deliberately shows no ads and relies on as few external services/resources as possible, so I'm not happy embedding an ad in every request (I know it has been reverted, but it's still shown on https://caddyserver.com/pricing https://caddyserver.com/pricing which would make me concerned about it coming back). * The personal/commercial licence split is something I don't want to have to worry about. Currently the personal licence is fine, but what if I decide to add ads to get a few pounds a month back? It's not something I really want to have to think about. * Pricing - I would consider paying to avoid the header/concerns about personal/commercial split, but starting at $1200/year (billed annually) is a complete non-starter. It's nowhere near what I could afford, but I'm also not seeing why you would pay that - basic email support doesn't seem compelling, there are no additional features over the free version, and it seems any company who could afford to pay it would also be in a place to build from source (or pay for an nginx consultant and get a comparable feature set). Of course the Caddy devs are entitled to make these changes, but they make it into something I don't want to use. Two other quick points while I'm here: * Brand guidelines of "Please do not call it Caddy Server" seem strange when the main domain is caddyserver.com * Linking to an EULA (from the footer of caddyserver.com) that contains e.g. "{{if eq .Type "personal"}}" is less than useful.

CoreXtreme 9y ago

1. Dealing with paying customers is actually worse than this. Unless, of course, you have an army of lawyers. 2. You initially sold people on this project. That's what got your project enough eyeballs in the first place for you to even consider making it a business. 3. Of course, your acquaintance will not complain - that's precisely the reason they are still with you. As you got upset when people told you of your unfairness. It's such a pity that these days people don't even have friends who can tell them the truth to their face. 4. OSS as requires a certain spirit. The OSS project is being sold on a set of ideas which is exactly opposite of the commercial world - that's why they use and contribute to your product. 5. Maybe you are too poor to be an open source contributor, I suggest getting a job and not expecting to make money by flipping the board. That will get you more fame and respect. That said, now playing victim will not help you.