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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

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?
        pjmlp 7y ago
        No, one time purchases, without distribution royalties. And? Supermarkets don't take pull requests.
    - 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!

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?
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        No, one time purchases, without distribution royalties. And? Supermarkets don't take pull requests.
  - 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!