10 ms·

Caddy Proposal: Permanently change all proprietary licensing to open source

357 points by scrollaway 7y ago

djsumdog 7y ago
It's been a while since I've seen Caddy here and I do remember all the controversy over the licensing. It is difficult to make an open source project and find a way to monetize/live off of it and there's always been that push/pull with projects like this, Redis, and others. Back during that mess, I settled on haproxy+certbot+nginx in containers to setup my personal sites, but something like Caddy can greatly simplify that kind of stack. This is pretty cool news and I hope this project continues to develop. How have they solved their funding problems? Does this have to do with the comment about Ardan Labs? For other people with FOSS projects who want to be able to work on this kind of stuff full time and not care about motorization, what options are there (other than Patreon/crowd/community type funding?)
- M4v3R 7y ago
  They said that they will focus on supporting enterprise clients, so that’s probably where the money will come from. This is similar to what Nginx is doing I believe.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Ah the rescue board of FOSS projects, because some devs can't be bothered to pay for their tooling.
    - M4v3R 7y ago
      Well, $25/per instance/per month is quite steep if you’re a small developer, especially not based in the US.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        There are plenty of countries where small developers can afford it, US is not the only one. When I was a student I did managed to buy several software packages, with student discounts, at prices that would be around 100 to 300 euros nowadays. Let alone when one is actually having a business instead of a student side job.
        darkwater 7y ago
        Good for you, but you can't expect that everybody is in the same situation as you.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Indeed, there are also plenty of stuff I cannot afford and have to contend with cheaper alternatives. Just like you cannot expect people that you don't support their work, keep doing it for free ad eternum.
        coldtea 7y ago
        >Just like you cannot expect people that you don't support their work, keep doing it for free ad eternum Sure you can.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        And then upstream developers go work for a corporation and everyone downstream comes with their pitchforks to HN, bad luck.
        nicoburns 7y ago
        Yeah, but it's still a lot for a small project which might easily run on a $5/month VPS. If your project is bigger than this then you don't gain much benefit from caddy: you might as well take half a day to setup certbot with nginx.
        heavenlyblue 7y ago
        >> When I was a student I did managed to buy several software packages, with student discounts, at prices that would be around 100 to 300 euros nowadays. Did you buy all of those packages yearly and for every one of your clients?
      - eitland 7y ago
        Short answer: Yep. And even for developers in western countries there is still the hassle of pushing it through purchasing. Long answer, hopefully really thoughtful and careful as I've had time to think this through: I think I remember sponsoring Caddy when it was still an open source project. Not much, maybe USD25 or 35 or something (dinner level or something I think it said). Also I think they got a grant or sponsorship from Mozilla. I never used it though, I only donated because I was enthusiastic about him creating a nice open source project that I would likely use in the future. Next I know it is a commercial project, more or less (it took a while before I realized he had left a way around it and it seemed entirely intentional that it wasn't obvious.) So now I have helped someone start a business, which is nice but not what I thought I did when I donated to a permissively licensed open source project. (I thought I was helping create a new Apache server.) Still no big problems so far in my case, I'm lucky that USD25 is not much in my case and he probably deserved it even if it left a small sour taste right there and then. The bigger problem is I never started using Caddy because when I came back to use Caddy I had to consider if my use case would be OK, if I would have to pay a license (which is fine with me but an extra hassle as it has to got through my boss) and suddenly it was very easy to fall back to Apache. Suddenly instead of helping kickstart an open source project around a product I loved I've helped start a business with a product that I can't use.
      - PixyMisa 7y ago
        They have had startup pricing of $20 per month for unlimited instances, which is what I've been paying. Though mostly I've just installed the free version with the HTTP ad header.
      - gregmac 7y ago
        One of the things with using commercially-licensed components like this in your stack is that is greatly increases complexity. You have to worry about counting instances vs licenses. This might sound trivial, but months down the road, are you still remembering to go through and check which licenses are affected anytime you make a change to the number of instances you're running? Can you spin up another instance or two to handle a load burst, or does that violate your license terms and/or require a purchase order go through finance first? What about dev/staging/testing stacks? Can you spin up a replacement for your production in a blue-green deployment and flip, or do you require 2x licenses? If the license is enforced technically (eg, a license file) then you have to also have that as part of your deployment, but also make sure you secure it. In the worst case if the license is unique per instance, that pretty much precludes use in modern "cloud" environments. What guarantee is there the cost won't go up 10x come renewal time next year? If it does, what does it take to replace the component? As others have pointed out, you also have to go through purchasing and maybe convince someone(s) that this purchase is necessary, etc. This is all extra cost (time) and pain that really doesn't exist with using OSS -- and brings it far above whatever the list price is (even if it's "only" $25/node). Also, from a developer perspective, none of these problems are fun or interesting to spend time on. Even if it has some feature that's missing in the OSS equivalent, I'd way rather spend my time building out a missing feature than doing licensing paperwork.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      That's the point of the licensing. It's free to use. Don't do it if you don't want to give it away for free.
- dullgiulio 7y ago
  Nginx does have paid-only features, so I don't really think your "purity move" hit the target... The harsh truth is that even Free Software costs money to write, and developers should be paid.
  - TAForObvReasons 7y ago
    nginx has an ad-free truly FOSS offering under BSD-2-Clause (not AGPL or SSPL) that isn't intentionally hamstrung. Their paid features are for larger and more advanced deployments. They don't try to claim a different non-commercial license for the binaries. It's definitely a massive step up compared to how Caddy operated in the past.
    - dullgiulio 7y ago
      If you start an nginx reverse proxy and it cannot reach upstream, nginx won't start at all. Only way to fix this is to pay. Some friends got hit by this: they forgot some upstream from a domain that got removed, at the next nginx restart the whole server didn't come up. Basically you have to pay for basic error handling. It's not "more advanced deployments" at all.
      - heavenlyblue 7y ago
        >> If you start an nginx reverse proxy and it cannot reach upstream, nginx won't start at all. Only way to fix this is to pay. I don't understand - if my upstream is down my nginx returns the usual "503 Service Unavailable". Are there any particulars to the configuration you are describing?
        Goz3rr 7y ago
        It only happens when nginx is starting and the hostname of the upstream doesn't resolve, doesn't have to be reachable. I believe just specifying a resolver should fix it, but another common workaround is to use a variable for the hostname
        7y ago
- pierotofy 7y ago
  Sell something: https://piero.dev/2019/04/how-to-make-money-with-open-source/ https://piero.dev/2019/04/how-to-make-money-with-open-source...
- paulddraper 7y ago
  From Github > Congratulations! Interesting new approach to funding open source: get acquired and let them figure it out!
therein 7y ago
As long as the author can keep his hands from injecting "Sponsored-By" headers into my responses, I'd call it a win.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Depends, are you willing to actually pay in some form for using it? Donations, books, patreon, pull requests.
  - geodel 7y ago
    A lot of devs really feel open source software can be written for free while they themselves need to be paid top dollars. And we can see this outrage for large projects as well where people constantly rail against Oracle as if OpenJDK just get developed without millions in cost to Oracle. Or outrage against Go because Google put a small logo on Go website. There are so many other examples with same pattern. So these devs crib on little amount of money to OSS devs but big time supporters must not put any ad at all.
    - kirse 7y ago
      A lot of devs really feel open source software can be written for free while they themselves need to be paid top dollars. Of course we need to be paid top dollar. We donate our (finite) time and mental resources at the cost of family life, etc. to integrate and master 9 Javascript libraries, 8 messaging formats, 7 architectural patterns, 6 programming languages, 5 package managers, 4 cloud platforms, 3 operating systems, 2 caching tools, and 1 HTTP server to power it all. Along the way, the creators of quality OSS benefit from the popularity of having thousands of adherents donating their collective millions of hours and trillions of neurons learning their software packages and providing fixes, ideas, and polishing to their product. And once the users have all 45 of those tools successfully integrated over years of effort and lessons learned, along comes an OSS creator who writes the newest 9 Javascript libraries...
- herohamp 7y ago
  I would happily accept sponsored by headers if it meant free commercial use of caddy
kemitchell 7y ago
I have done only a smidgen of Go programming, and don't know Caddy or any of the firms mentioned in the issue. Do I correctly understand that Light Code Labs, the company steward of the Caddy project, is shifting to an entirely professional services-based business model, which is Ardan Labs' business model, by partnering with them?
- mrunkel 7y ago
  What I understood was that in the future Ardan Labs would provide paid support for Caddy. Light Code Labs would receive financial support directly from Ardan Labs. Since Ardan Labs is already in the support business, this would allow them to expand their business while Light Code could focus on coding.
  - yroc92 7y ago
    Yes this is pretty much how it is. Ardan is a great company.
de_watcher 7y ago
Oh, I thought it's a proposal to permanently change all proprietary licensing in the world to open source...
- instagraham 7y ago
  Yeah, me too. I actually thought of it as a sort of innovation-economic stimulus package and went "oh wow, this could work". Imagine the amount of innovation we'd get if this happened with hardware too. But then I opened the article and was brought back to earth. soon
  - KitDuncan 7y ago
    > oh wow, this could work Sounds like you should give it a shot...
  - codingdave 7y ago
    I'm intrigued that you thought such a plan could work - I don't see that, but I'd like to. Could you elaborate on what you had envisioned?
  - munfred 7y ago
    Same. I have this fantasy where I wonder: what if all software became public domain, and you reward creators based on the GitHub stars a repo has, weighted by something like page rank? Then I realized this could be extended to anything where there is a platform for rating the content creation, from books (Goodreads) to arts (deviant art) to deeds (Facebook and Twitter). Then my friend told me I had reinvented Whuffie, as presented in the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom... The main problem with this idea is that the money for paying creators would probably have to come from the government, since who else would pitch in to support this? But hey, people talk about universal basic income, this is like a weighted version...
Calashle0202 7y ago
Never heard of the project, but looks good. Good to see they are making efforts to change the license. Curious, who/when would you use caddy? If I were to be building and deploying microservices with the likes of Gin, Mux, etc.. would I have a use for this library? Or is this primarily for those wanting to serve static html pages? Still trying to get a foot hold on what my tool kit is going to consist of to build my software product.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  I've used caddy in places where I needed nginx but wanted end to end ssl and didn't want to deal with local letsencrypt cronjobs. But caddy is also pretty cool to use as a development web server as well.
- corobo 7y ago
  I’m planning on using Caddy to provide bring-your-own-domain handling for a project I’m working on. Your user points their domain to your caddy server and it sets up https automatically - including the certificate - during the first request https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#on-demand https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#on-demand Obviously not what it’s limited to, but that’s it’s selling feature for me
- manigandham 7y ago
  Caddy is a webserver and can be used for static or dynamic sites in any stack. It's primary popular feature was easy and automatic SSL via LetsEncrypt integration. You can look at the features list to see more: https://caddyserver.com/features https://caddyserver.com/features
- bovermyer 7y ago
  I use Caddy (the compiled product) as the reverse proxy and automagic SSL certificate manager for all of my personal sites. I do not use Caddy (the code) as a library.
IshKebab 7y ago
This is great news, I hope it works out for them. Caddy is definitely the easiest web server to set up, and it was a shame when it went commercial, even though I probably would have done the same thing.
coleca 7y ago
This is great news for Caddy. I have worked with Ardan Labs in the past and they are a terrific organization with some incredibly talented engineers.
atonse 7y ago
My guess is they’re doing this since maybe Caddy’s growth may have slowed down since they did that confusing commercial use licensing? I went from “I’m going to use this everywhere” to “I’ll switch back to nginx the next time I have time to transition back” Because it was too expensive to host little sites on. I’m relieved that I procrastinated. Now i can continue to use it in many places since Caddy is awesome.
- joncalhoun 7y ago
  My guess is you are incorrect and this has more to do with the Ardan Labs partnership[1][2]. This release also came shortly after Bill (founder of Ardan Labs) went to visit Matt and discuss Caddy[3], which helps support that claim. Prior to the partnership I believe the real issue was that Matt & co didn't have a sustainable way to maintain the project and they were trying to figure that out. I don't know the details of the partnership with Ardan Labs, but my guess is it is structured in a way that allows Caddy to focus solely on building out a great product without worrying about monetizing it so they dropped all the proprietary licensing. [1] - https://www.ardanlabs.com/news/2019/05/ardan-labs-partners-with-caddy.html https://www.ardanlabs.com/news/2019/05/ardan-labs-partners-w... [2] - https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1179957356005707776 https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1179957356005707776 [3] - https://twitter.com/goinggodotnet/status/1178949305421438976 https://twitter.com/goinggodotnet/status/1178949305421438976
  - atonse 7y ago
    Point taken. Take my damn upvote :-)

357 points by scrollaway 7y ago

It's been a while since I've seen Caddy here and I do remember all the controversy over the licensing. It is difficult to make an open source project and find a way to monetize/live off of it and there's always been that push/pull with projects like this, Redis, and others. Back during that mess, I settled on haproxy+certbot+nginx in containers to setup my personal sites, but something like Caddy can greatly simplify that kind of stack. This is pretty cool news and I hope this project continues to develop. How have they solved their funding problems? Does this have to do with the comment about Ardan Labs? For other people with FOSS projects who want to be able to work on this kind of stuff full time and not care about motorization, what options are there (other than Patreon/crowd/community type funding?)

M4v3R 7y ago
They said that they will focus on supporting enterprise clients, so that’s probably where the money will come from. This is similar to what Nginx is doing I believe.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Ah the rescue board of FOSS projects, because some devs can't be bothered to pay for their tooling.
  - M4v3R 7y ago
    Well, $25/per instance/per month is quite steep if you’re a small developer, especially not based in the US.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      There are plenty of countries where small developers can afford it, US is not the only one. When I was a student I did managed to buy several software packages, with student discounts, at prices that would be around 100 to 300 euros nowadays. Let alone when one is actually having a business instead of a student side job.
      - darkwater 7y ago
        Good for you, but you can't expect that everybody is in the same situation as you.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Indeed, there are also plenty of stuff I cannot afford and have to contend with cheaper alternatives. Just like you cannot expect people that you don't support their work, keep doing it for free ad eternum.
        coldtea 7y ago
        >Just like you cannot expect people that you don't support their work, keep doing it for free ad eternum Sure you can.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        And then upstream developers go work for a corporation and everyone downstream comes with their pitchforks to HN, bad luck.
      - nicoburns 7y ago
        Yeah, but it's still a lot for a small project which might easily run on a $5/month VPS. If your project is bigger than this then you don't gain much benefit from caddy: you might as well take half a day to setup certbot with nginx.
      - heavenlyblue 7y ago
        >> When I was a student I did managed to buy several software packages, with student discounts, at prices that would be around 100 to 300 euros nowadays. Did you buy all of those packages yearly and for every one of your clients?
    - eitland 7y ago
      Short answer: Yep. And even for developers in western countries there is still the hassle of pushing it through purchasing. Long answer, hopefully really thoughtful and careful as I've had time to think this through: I think I remember sponsoring Caddy when it was still an open source project. Not much, maybe USD25 or 35 or something (dinner level or something I think it said). Also I think they got a grant or sponsorship from Mozilla. I never used it though, I only donated because I was enthusiastic about him creating a nice open source project that I would likely use in the future. Next I know it is a commercial project, more or less (it took a while before I realized he had left a way around it and it seemed entirely intentional that it wasn't obvious.) So now I have helped someone start a business, which is nice but not what I thought I did when I donated to a permissively licensed open source project. (I thought I was helping create a new Apache server.) Still no big problems so far in my case, I'm lucky that USD25 is not much in my case and he probably deserved it even if it left a small sour taste right there and then. The bigger problem is I never started using Caddy because when I came back to use Caddy I had to consider if my use case would be OK, if I would have to pay a license (which is fine with me but an extra hassle as it has to got through my boss) and suddenly it was very easy to fall back to Apache. Suddenly instead of helping kickstart an open source project around a product I loved I've helped start a business with a product that I can't use.
    - PixyMisa 7y ago
      They have had startup pricing of $20 per month for unlimited instances, which is what I've been paying. Though mostly I've just installed the free version with the HTTP ad header.
    - gregmac 7y ago
      One of the things with using commercially-licensed components like this in your stack is that is greatly increases complexity. You have to worry about counting instances vs licenses. This might sound trivial, but months down the road, are you still remembering to go through and check which licenses are affected anytime you make a change to the number of instances you're running? Can you spin up another instance or two to handle a load burst, or does that violate your license terms and/or require a purchase order go through finance first? What about dev/staging/testing stacks? Can you spin up a replacement for your production in a blue-green deployment and flip, or do you require 2x licenses? If the license is enforced technically (eg, a license file) then you have to also have that as part of your deployment, but also make sure you secure it. In the worst case if the license is unique per instance, that pretty much precludes use in modern "cloud" environments. What guarantee is there the cost won't go up 10x come renewal time next year? If it does, what does it take to replace the component? As others have pointed out, you also have to go through purchasing and maybe convince someone(s) that this purchase is necessary, etc. This is all extra cost (time) and pain that really doesn't exist with using OSS -- and brings it far above whatever the list price is (even if it's "only" $25/node). Also, from a developer perspective, none of these problems are fun or interesting to spend time on. Even if it has some feature that's missing in the OSS equivalent, I'd way rather spend my time building out a missing feature than doing licensing paperwork.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    That's the point of the licensing. It's free to use. Don't do it if you don't want to give it away for free.
dullgiulio 7y ago
Nginx does have paid-only features, so I don't really think your "purity move" hit the target... The harsh truth is that even Free Software costs money to write, and developers should be paid.
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago
  nginx has an ad-free truly FOSS offering under BSD-2-Clause (not AGPL or SSPL) that isn't intentionally hamstrung. Their paid features are for larger and more advanced deployments. They don't try to claim a different non-commercial license for the binaries. It's definitely a massive step up compared to how Caddy operated in the past.
  - dullgiulio 7y ago
    If you start an nginx reverse proxy and it cannot reach upstream, nginx won't start at all. Only way to fix this is to pay. Some friends got hit by this: they forgot some upstream from a domain that got removed, at the next nginx restart the whole server didn't come up. Basically you have to pay for basic error handling. It's not "more advanced deployments" at all.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      >> If you start an nginx reverse proxy and it cannot reach upstream, nginx won't start at all. Only way to fix this is to pay. I don't understand - if my upstream is down my nginx returns the usual "503 Service Unavailable". Are there any particulars to the configuration you are describing?
      - Goz3rr 7y ago
        It only happens when nginx is starting and the hostname of the upstream doesn't resolve, doesn't have to be reachable. I believe just specifying a resolver should fix it, but another common workaround is to use a variable for the hostname
      - 7y ago
pierotofy 7y ago
Sell something: https://piero.dev/2019/04/how-to-make-money-with-open-source/ https://piero.dev/2019/04/how-to-make-money-with-open-source...
paulddraper 7y ago
From Github > Congratulations! Interesting new approach to funding open source: get acquired and let them figure it out!

therein 7y ago

As long as the author can keep his hands from injecting "Sponsored-By" headers into my responses, I'd call it a win.

pjmlp 7y ago
Depends, are you willing to actually pay in some form for using it? Donations, books, patreon, pull requests.
- geodel 7y ago
  A lot of devs really feel open source software can be written for free while they themselves need to be paid top dollars. And we can see this outrage for large projects as well where people constantly rail against Oracle as if OpenJDK just get developed without millions in cost to Oracle. Or outrage against Go because Google put a small logo on Go website. There are so many other examples with same pattern. So these devs crib on little amount of money to OSS devs but big time supporters must not put any ad at all.
  - kirse 7y ago
    A lot of devs really feel open source software can be written for free while they themselves need to be paid top dollars. Of course we need to be paid top dollar. We donate our (finite) time and mental resources at the cost of family life, etc. to integrate and master 9 Javascript libraries, 8 messaging formats, 7 architectural patterns, 6 programming languages, 5 package managers, 4 cloud platforms, 3 operating systems, 2 caching tools, and 1 HTTP server to power it all. Along the way, the creators of quality OSS benefit from the popularity of having thousands of adherents donating their collective millions of hours and trillions of neurons learning their software packages and providing fixes, ideas, and polishing to their product. And once the users have all 45 of those tools successfully integrated over years of effort and lessons learned, along comes an OSS creator who writes the newest 9 Javascript libraries...
herohamp 7y ago
I would happily accept sponsored by headers if it meant free commercial use of caddy

kemitchell 7y ago

I have done only a smidgen of Go programming, and don't know Caddy or any of the firms mentioned in the issue. Do I correctly understand that Light Code Labs, the company steward of the Caddy project, is shifting to an entirely professional services-based business model, which is Ardan Labs' business model, by partnering with them?

mrunkel 7y ago
What I understood was that in the future Ardan Labs would provide paid support for Caddy. Light Code Labs would receive financial support directly from Ardan Labs. Since Ardan Labs is already in the support business, this would allow them to expand their business while Light Code could focus on coding.
- yroc92 7y ago
  Yes this is pretty much how it is. Ardan is a great company.

de_watcher 7y ago

Oh, I thought it's a proposal to permanently change all proprietary licensing in the world to open source...

instagraham 7y ago
Yeah, me too. I actually thought of it as a sort of innovation-economic stimulus package and went "oh wow, this could work". Imagine the amount of innovation we'd get if this happened with hardware too. But then I opened the article and was brought back to earth. soon
- KitDuncan 7y ago
  > oh wow, this could work Sounds like you should give it a shot...
- codingdave 7y ago
  I'm intrigued that you thought such a plan could work - I don't see that, but I'd like to. Could you elaborate on what you had envisioned?
- munfred 7y ago
  Same. I have this fantasy where I wonder: what if all software became public domain, and you reward creators based on the GitHub stars a repo has, weighted by something like page rank? Then I realized this could be extended to anything where there is a platform for rating the content creation, from books (Goodreads) to arts (deviant art) to deeds (Facebook and Twitter). Then my friend told me I had reinvented Whuffie, as presented in the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom... The main problem with this idea is that the money for paying creators would probably have to come from the government, since who else would pitch in to support this? But hey, people talk about universal basic income, this is like a weighted version...

Calashle0202 7y ago

Never heard of the project, but looks good. Good to see they are making efforts to change the license. Curious, who/when would you use caddy? If I were to be building and deploying microservices with the likes of Gin, Mux, etc.. would I have a use for this library? Or is this primarily for those wanting to serve static html pages? Still trying to get a foot hold on what my tool kit is going to consist of to build my software product.

scrollaway 7y ago
I've used caddy in places where I needed nginx but wanted end to end ssl and didn't want to deal with local letsencrypt cronjobs. But caddy is also pretty cool to use as a development web server as well.
corobo 7y ago
I’m planning on using Caddy to provide bring-your-own-domain handling for a project I’m working on. Your user points their domain to your caddy server and it sets up https automatically - including the certificate - during the first request https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#on-demand https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#on-demand Obviously not what it’s limited to, but that’s it’s selling feature for me
manigandham 7y ago
Caddy is a webserver and can be used for static or dynamic sites in any stack. It's primary popular feature was easy and automatic SSL via LetsEncrypt integration. You can look at the features list to see more: https://caddyserver.com/features https://caddyserver.com/features
bovermyer 7y ago
I use Caddy (the compiled product) as the reverse proxy and automagic SSL certificate manager for all of my personal sites. I do not use Caddy (the code) as a library.

IshKebab 7y ago

This is great news, I hope it works out for them. Caddy is definitely the easiest web server to set up, and it was a shame when it went commercial, even though I probably would have done the same thing.

coleca 7y ago

This is great news for Caddy. I have worked with Ardan Labs in the past and they are a terrific organization with some incredibly talented engineers.

atonse 7y ago

My guess is they’re doing this since maybe Caddy’s growth may have slowed down since they did that confusing commercial use licensing? I went from “I’m going to use this everywhere” to “I’ll switch back to nginx the next time I have time to transition back” Because it was too expensive to host little sites on. I’m relieved that I procrastinated. Now i can continue to use it in many places since Caddy is awesome.

joncalhoun 7y ago
My guess is you are incorrect and this has more to do with the Ardan Labs partnership[1][2]. This release also came shortly after Bill (founder of Ardan Labs) went to visit Matt and discuss Caddy[3], which helps support that claim. Prior to the partnership I believe the real issue was that Matt & co didn't have a sustainable way to maintain the project and they were trying to figure that out. I don't know the details of the partnership with Ardan Labs, but my guess is it is structured in a way that allows Caddy to focus solely on building out a great product without worrying about monetizing it so they dropped all the proprietary licensing. [1] - https://www.ardanlabs.com/news/2019/05/ardan-labs-partners-with-caddy.html https://www.ardanlabs.com/news/2019/05/ardan-labs-partners-w... [2] - https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1179957356005707776 https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1179957356005707776 [3] - https://twitter.com/goinggodotnet/status/1178949305421438976 https://twitter.com/goinggodotnet/status/1178949305421438976
- atonse 7y ago
  Point taken. Take my damn upvote :-)