3 ms·

Damn shame people won't pay for features they claim to need.

by kjs3 3y ago

withinboredom 3y ago
The thing is, they aren't 'needs' just nice-to-haves that are provided for free with other open-source software. Thus, when trying to choose technology for personal projects, people don't choose your software. They choose a 'competitor.' Thus when it comes time to choose software with a green-field or startup, the non-free solution isn't chosen because devs aren't familiar with it. Literally, at work (a startup), we use Traefik (which is horrible imho) instead of nginx (which I've used literally everywhere else) because the devs who originally started this project had never used it on a personal project. So the issue isn't paying for it, it is about making it useful enough for personal projects that people use it for personal projects that it then gets used on professional projects. Right now, it is barely useful for personal projects unless you know what you're doing.
- heipei 3y ago
  This is a great point. People use Caddy because for simple cases the configuration is seemingly "easy", and more importantly it includes Let's Encrypt out of the box. I've tried to argue with these users that nginx has many powerful (and necessary) features, to no avail. Traefik is a similar story: It integrates neatly with Consul for service discovery so it's a go-to tool for TLS termination in front of a service mesh. Do I personally need DNS SRV support? No, I have a templated Nomad config that will re-render and reload the nginx config if the consul upstreams change. Setting this up though is definitely a bigger hurdle than just specifying a Consul service as an upstream.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    I mean, if nginx offered a free personal license that worked on 5 servers (which would match up to Ubuntu Pro's free personal license), I'd be all over that. I have 3 servers and I'm very unlikely to dish out $500 a month, per server, to get nginx+, but I could sell that to my employer if I was already familiar with the technology or could convince my coworkers to go give it a try and see what they thought. It seems they're more interested in high-touch sales (which is unlikely to happen on a dev team), vs. organic growth.
    - sneak 3y ago
      There is of course the issue of consistency: you can't be said to believe in free software (which is an ideology based around the rights of users) if you operate a proprietary software vendor. A vendor that releases some free software and some proprietary software is a proprietary software vendor. (This describes, for example, both Microsoft and nginx.)
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        Yes, but people have to be ABLE to pay for your software. I simply cannot afford nginx+ for a hobby, and I'm a "free" asset when I make decisions for a company that CAN pay. Also, a startup may use the 'personal' license pre-revenue, then when it is time to scale up, they have to pay. Their features are coupled to your product, and they are going to pay because they have to (or rewrite a lot of code), a 'trial' simply isn't going to allow this to happen.
  - francislavoie 3y ago
    FYI, Caddy has DNS SRV support for free. https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_proxy#srv https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_pr...
  - nginxsux 3y ago
    Or maybe, just maybe, devs are sick of software that pretends it’s still 1995. Nginx is awful to work with, and has an awful community. The cherry on top is the OpenResty “community”. You know the one that call you an idiot for not pretending Lua is orgasmically good; the one that declares you “just” implement thousands of lines of code because there’s no possible way a useful library could exist; the one with the ecosystem full of awful, worse than js leftpad garbage that hasn’t been updated in three years. Give me a break. F nginx and openresty.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    Maybe "these users" are not as braindead as you think? nginx still defaults to settings that made sense in 2005. I usually go for caddy now not because I am not familiar with nginx, but because it doesn't require me to drop hundreds of lines of config across a dozen of includes to get a properly configured HTTP server. Automation doesn't make much sense in our use case, and it gets tiring maintaining a separate ansible playbook just for nginx setup. Caddy has sane defaults for many settings and I only need to add a couple of response headers, drop the domain name, and where to proxy the requests to. It takes care of maintaining things like the list of TLSv1.2 ciphersuites. Adding more domains takes two lines of config thanks to parameterized includes — another important thing nginx misses that has to be implemented manually via scripts using something like envsubst (or again, full-on automation which is problematic if many of your servers are just a little bit different from each other — for good reasons). Apache httpd has it by the way: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_macro.html https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_macro.html
getcrunk 3y ago
Not all of us are enterprise customers with enterprise budgets. There is no middle option. It starts at 3675 annually per instance. That’s more than the price of most of my servers
misleading1 3y ago
Weird how Nginx is like the only webserver in the history of mankind that offers caching capabilities but doesn't handle DELETE or PURGE verbs
jdoss 3y ago
I love paying for software features that I need, but anything over $100 a month is too much for my personal budget for side projects. For example, I really want to run HA Traefik with Let's Encrypt shared across three instances in my datacenter rack, but Traefik Enterprise is many times more than what I can afford to pay, so I make due with one instance because the service discovery features for Nomad are fantastic. Same for Hashicorp Vault. I'd pay $100/mo for an Enterprise Vault for the HSM integration. I really wish companies would come up with SMB pricing to help us side project hackers out so we could grow into paying for the bigger plans. Also, I understand why they don't. SMB support is a huge PITA.
benatkin 3y ago
Or maybe we just like open source...
hinkley 3y ago
It's per server We do pay them, for a bunch of boxes. But I can't afford to run their plus version in front of every microservice. Or even in front of our entry point server. That's 5 times as many machines, plus staged versions of the app, plus other services running on the same boxes. If you're running anything that is not multithreaded, you're running a reverse proxy in front of it. And even then you can still improve server availability by running a reverse proxy.

Damn shame people won't pay for features they claim to need.

by kjs3 3y ago

Damn shame people won't pay for features they claim to need.

The thing is, they aren't 'needs' just nice-to-haves that are provided for free with other open-source software. Thus, when trying to choose technology for personal projects, people don't choose your software. They choose a 'competitor.' Thus when it comes time to choose software with a green-field or startup, the non-free solution isn't chosen because devs aren't familiar with it. Literally, at work (a startup), we use Traefik (which is horrible imho) instead of nginx (which I've used literally everywhere else) because the devs who originally started this project had never used it on a personal project. So the issue isn't paying for it, it is about making it useful enough for personal projects that people use it for personal projects that it then gets used on professional projects. Right now, it is barely useful for personal projects unless you know what you're doing.

heipei 3y ago
This is a great point. People use Caddy because for simple cases the configuration is seemingly "easy", and more importantly it includes Let's Encrypt out of the box. I've tried to argue with these users that nginx has many powerful (and necessary) features, to no avail. Traefik is a similar story: It integrates neatly with Consul for service discovery so it's a go-to tool for TLS termination in front of a service mesh. Do I personally need DNS SRV support? No, I have a templated Nomad config that will re-render and reload the nginx config if the consul upstreams change. Setting this up though is definitely a bigger hurdle than just specifying a Consul service as an upstream.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  I mean, if nginx offered a free personal license that worked on 5 servers (which would match up to Ubuntu Pro's free personal license), I'd be all over that. I have 3 servers and I'm very unlikely to dish out $500 a month, per server, to get nginx+, but I could sell that to my employer if I was already familiar with the technology or could convince my coworkers to go give it a try and see what they thought. It seems they're more interested in high-touch sales (which is unlikely to happen on a dev team), vs. organic growth.
  - sneak 3y ago
    There is of course the issue of consistency: you can't be said to believe in free software (which is an ideology based around the rights of users) if you operate a proprietary software vendor. A vendor that releases some free software and some proprietary software is a proprietary software vendor. (This describes, for example, both Microsoft and nginx.)
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      Yes, but people have to be ABLE to pay for your software. I simply cannot afford nginx+ for a hobby, and I'm a "free" asset when I make decisions for a company that CAN pay. Also, a startup may use the 'personal' license pre-revenue, then when it is time to scale up, they have to pay. Their features are coupled to your product, and they are going to pay because they have to (or rewrite a lot of code), a 'trial' simply isn't going to allow this to happen.
- francislavoie 3y ago
  FYI, Caddy has DNS SRV support for free. https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_proxy#srv https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_pr...
- nginxsux 3y ago
  Or maybe, just maybe, devs are sick of software that pretends it’s still 1995. Nginx is awful to work with, and has an awful community. The cherry on top is the OpenResty “community”. You know the one that call you an idiot for not pretending Lua is orgasmically good; the one that declares you “just” implement thousands of lines of code because there’s no possible way a useful library could exist; the one with the ecosystem full of awful, worse than js leftpad garbage that hasn’t been updated in three years. Give me a break. F nginx and openresty.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Maybe "these users" are not as braindead as you think? nginx still defaults to settings that made sense in 2005. I usually go for caddy now not because I am not familiar with nginx, but because it doesn't require me to drop hundreds of lines of config across a dozen of includes to get a properly configured HTTP server. Automation doesn't make much sense in our use case, and it gets tiring maintaining a separate ansible playbook just for nginx setup. Caddy has sane defaults for many settings and I only need to add a couple of response headers, drop the domain name, and where to proxy the requests to. It takes care of maintaining things like the list of TLSv1.2 ciphersuites. Adding more domains takes two lines of config thanks to parameterized includes — another important thing nginx misses that has to be implemented manually via scripts using something like envsubst (or again, full-on automation which is problematic if many of your servers are just a little bit different from each other — for good reasons). Apache httpd has it by the way: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_macro.html https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_macro.html

getcrunk 3y ago

Not all of us are enterprise customers with enterprise budgets. There is no middle option. It starts at 3675 annually per instance. That’s more than the price of most of my servers

misleading1 3y ago

Weird how Nginx is like the only webserver in the history of mankind that offers caching capabilities but doesn't handle DELETE or PURGE verbs

jdoss 3y ago

I love paying for software features that I need, but anything over $100 a month is too much for my personal budget for side projects. For example, I really want to run HA Traefik with Let's Encrypt shared across three instances in my datacenter rack, but Traefik Enterprise is many times more than what I can afford to pay, so I make due with one instance because the service discovery features for Nomad are fantastic. Same for Hashicorp Vault. I'd pay $100/mo for an Enterprise Vault for the HSM integration. I really wish companies would come up with SMB pricing to help us side project hackers out so we could grow into paying for the bigger plans. Also, I understand why they don't. SMB support is a huge PITA.

benatkin 3y ago

Or maybe we just like open source...

hinkley 3y ago

It's per server We do pay them, for a bunch of boxes. But I can't afford to run their plus version in front of every microservice. Or even in front of our entry point server. That's 5 times as many machines, plus staged versions of the app, plus other services running on the same boxes. If you're running anything that is not multithreaded, you're running a reverse proxy in front of it. And even then you can still improve server availability by running a reverse proxy.