> 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

> 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