
Is Caddy Free? - embik
https://caddyserver.com/blog/is-caddy-free
======
patio11
Out of an abundance of desire for you to be happy and this project to succeed:

You should sell something. You have a variety of options for "something." [+]
You will always make more money selling something than selling nothing. Your
project is orders of magnitudes too small, and not popular enough with the
right people, to subsist on donations from developers. (Sponsorships are a
thing you can sell, and are not donations. They're priced at 3~4 orders of
magnitude higher than donations, are budgeted out of places other than
"charity", and can be sold rather than hoped for.)

You do not owe anyone an apology for choosing to sell something. You do not
owe yourself an apology for choosing to sell something. You do not need to
mention the economy or your personal economic circumstances. It will not
successfully motivate anyone to pay you a thousand dollars. No lawyer in the
country does that. No doctor in the country does that. No teacher in the
country does that. You being compensated for your professional labor is not an
outlandish request. It is the default. This will discomfit some freeloaders in
your community. They contribute no patches or money. Let them wget the
binaries; do not allow them to wget an iota of your stress budget.

[ + ] A specific example of a thing you can sell that can't be said of every
OSS project that hits HN: There exist literally thousands of businesses on the
Internet which host websites for other businesses. Some of them allow their
customers to upgrade service to include an HTTPS certificate; many don't,
would like to, but cannot offer that given technical constraints. Caddy is a
drop-in [ ++ ] minimal-risk option for any less-than-galactic-scale hosting
company to offer "HTTPS certs at scale that just work" for e.g. the local
bakery.

This is something they can offer to clients. You can sell them on the
desirability of offering it and let them promote powered-by-Caddy "free SSL
certs for everyone purchasing our hosting." Any measurable uptick in business
from a hosting company running at anything greater than dormroom scale is
worth $$$$. You can say "There's a repo on the Internet which suggests a way
that you can get this done; if you'd prefer to ship it by next Tuesday,
there's a glide path available for $THOUSANDS."

[ ++ ] On reading more closely it isn't quite "drop-in" but given the amount
of value that would surface for users and the additional revenue possibilities
that would suggest prioritizing that fairly highly. The joys of product
management. The specific feature you probably want is reverse proxying;
happily, Go is practically a language built to write reverse proxies in.

~~~
mholt
Thanks for your comment, patio11! I don't regret adding a payment box to the
download page. My only regret right now is that I'm not a more
tactful/skillful writer. :) Sponsorships are a great idea; I think many
companies would benefit from having their customers use a web server with
automatic HTTPS, or who believe security and privacy on the Web should be
easy.

I admit it's a little weird transitioning from undergrad where you pay to do
things when you're told to, to a professional living where you do things
because you're good at it and are paid to do it.

Addendum: The business value in a "drop-in minimal-risk" option for hosting
companies is appealing. If I do end up going the business plan route to earn a
living, it would probably be something like that.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
It's a little weird, but you'll get used to it.

Caddy looks great, and I might end up using it for my next project. If I do,
and I make money off it, consider at least one sponsorship secured. :)

------
mholt
Hi folks, author here. Want to respond with a few things.

First, thanks for your support. The project has received the blessing of so
many of you and dozens - over 60 - of you have jumped in to contribute code to
make Caddy awesome. Really appreciate it, since I can't do it alone! The Go
and infosec community has really been amazing.

As I say in the post, this is not a business plan. I'm not relying on this to
earn a living. BUT I am a starting graduate student and if I am going to
continue maintaining Caddy on the side of graduate school, it will need your
support.

I know "free software" is a loaded term (cheers to rms) but in this post I
hope it's obvious that I'm not talking about "free as in freedom" \-- this
post is about cost/economics. Caddy is still Apache licensed.

Also: Several people have donated to the project (and Arroyo Networks sponsors
it) because they believe in free and automatic privacy for the Web, and they
want Caddy's focus on UX to permeate to other software products. Even backend
servers can have good UX. This is a cause that I feel passionate about and am
happy to do for you, time/funding permitting. (I hope Caddy will help people
see how easy security/privacy can be for the Web, similar to how Signal does
it for SMS and Keybase for PGP.)

In the end, I wanted to raise awareness of an issue, that even "free as in
price" open source projects have a cost, in time and talent that's invested by
the developer. "This is just open source."

~~~
timruffles
Really glad you're thinking about this, and making it explicit, buuuuut...

Why not dual-license, or look at the Fair Source license? The "donate please"
button is just going to be ignored, like Sublime's donate nag screens.

Make it so at least big companies who have open-source policies will pay for a
non-GPL license or support etc. You don't have to publish the history
containing Apache 2, republish, and write all new code with AGPL-3.0.

~~~
imron
> The "donate please" button is just going to be ignored,

I'm sure the "donate please" button will be mostly ignored, but putting a "pay
what you want" before the download button will not be.

Way back when, I wrote a windows IME for typing Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks
([https://www.pinyinput.net](https://www.pinyinput.net)) and for years just
had a "Donate" button on the site.

In the first 6 years of release, I could count on two hands the number of
donations it received (despite tens of thousands of downloads).

Then I changed the site so instead of having both a download and a donate
button that it just had a "purchase" button and a "pay what you want" field
with a suggested price of $5, with $0 allowed if you want.

It's still essentially the same setup as before - you can download it for free
or you can make a donation, but now by explicitly asking, every day or two
someone makes a "purchase" \- sometimes only a dollar, sometimes $5, once even
$50.

Sure, with this setup, Caddy probably won't make as much as if they offered
paid support plans, however they will almost certainly make more than they did
with just a "donate" button up the top of the page.

~~~
muraiki
Ubuntu does something similar, but since they work on many things they let you
decide how to split things up. What's interesting to me is that they show a
cost comparision at the bottom, such as $5 being the same as the cost of a
pint of beer. This really helps the user realize something like "I buy a pint
at the bar without thinking, why can't I give the same amount to software I
use every day?"

[http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=1...](http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=14.04.4&architecture=amd64)

------
c17r
As patio11 invariably says, offer a paid support option to make it real easy
for businesses to give you money.

~~~
jasonkester
Are you sure you're attributing that advice to the right person?

Because it's orders of magnitude less valuable advice that "offer a paid
version of the _product_ ". (Which you'll notice Patrick saying quite
regularly about open source projects using charity as a business model.)

Selling software you've built is a proven way to make money. Selling
consulting for software you've built is also a proven way to make money. But
only one of those require you to actually do _additional work_ in order to
collect the money. The smart choice should be obvious to anyone with a fully
formed sense of laziness.

~~~
c17r
Most recent example:
[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/658748957250596864](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/658748957250596864)

The issue is: it's easier for a business, particularly the line manager, to
just sign a contract for "support" which comes out of his OpEx budget than to
get a company to deal with a charitable donation which will probably have to
go through Finance and Legal.

~~~
jasonkester
You're right. I had read your previous post as "consulting" rather than paid
support (in which no actual work need take place in the normal case.)

As you (and Patrick) say, that works nicely.

------
tagrun
> we're inviting you to support Caddy by honestly paying back the value it
> provides you

So those who are not paying are dishonest. That's a bit aggressive, don't you
think?

> There's no such thing as free software. The question is, "Who pays the
> price?"

You're conflating two things here: the license of the _software_ and profits
of the _programmers_. I understand that conflating them here works for your
argument here, but they are different things. Of course there is such a thing
called free _software_. Go's HTTP library, which Caddy is wrapping, is a free
(both as in free beer and as in freedom) software for example. Are you
"honestly" going to send some percentage of your earnings to Google, and "pay
back the value it provides you"?

My entire OS is free software.

I do donate sometimes, but this has nothing to do with the license of the
software I'm using. I'm donating not because somebody is trying to convince me
that not doing so is immoral, but because I can and want to.

All this sounds similar to what Elementary OS people did a while ago. They
called their non-paying users cheaters. And while they asked money for their
FOSS distro, they weren't paying upstream or Debian anything. By their logic,
they are also cheating, but of course they don't talk about it.

Disclaimer: Never used your product (or Elementary OS for that matter), never
going to use it either.

------
MatthewWilkes
> There's no such thing as free software.

This just makes my mind jump to Maggie Thatcher. The complaint is valid but
the explanation is tone-deaf at best.

~~~
embik
I'm not involved with Caddy, but in my understanding the author has had some
bad times with his previous project. Sounds like - although it was popular
among companies and government - he had open bills caused by his work on it.
That certainly is a rather frustrating experience.

> I learned a lesson from my last project, Papa Parse. That project, like
> Caddy, experienced a very successful reception on Hacker News. It was picked
> up by numerous companies to enhance their product offering; government
> departments around the world use it, and even the United Nations and
> Wikimedia integrate it. But now I have to pay the bills, and inevitably,
> work goes where the money does.

------
ratbeard
My gut tells me asking for donations probably won't bring in that much,
unfortunately :|

Just wanted to say this project looks awesome. Builtin https configuration and
the simplicity of the config file are very nice.

------
bketelsen
I've been using Caddy for at least a year now, and I host several high-traffic
sites on it.* I was one of the first people to try the Let's Encrypt support
when it was in Alpha. The Caddy team has been amazingly supportive and
responsive during the whole process. Last week when I read this post I
immediately dug out my personal credit card and donated $75. It's not much,
but they add up. I hope others will too. I agree that making a paycheck out of
open source is complicated and confusing. Cheers to Matt & team for trying.

* Not HN definition of "high" probably, but still, not joe's blog either.

------
deftnerd
I think the best model would be a $5 a year membership fee for a mailing list
informing users of updates to the software. If someone is using Caddy in
production, they'll want to be alerted the moment that an update is available
and this would provide that.

~~~
simonw
At $5/year, you would need 30,000 subscribers just to pay for one senior
developer.

~~~
infogulch
But $5/year is so cheap you can easily get one-man-shops to buy into it and
you might even get people that don't use the product but want to follow the
project to subscribe.

------
hamandcheese
Just yesterday I downloaded Caddy to a DO droplet, pointed a domain at it, and
https literally "just worked." Caddy is magic, and certainly worthy of
donations.

------
iso-8859-1
Confusing since it is still free software by Stallman's definition.

~~~
julie1
you are confused.

Free in english means either 0$ or free as a speech. Free software is the
later.

And Stallman contradicts you : making your free software sustainable by
founding yourself is a must.

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html)

So before shaming fellow free software coders about what we do and know better
than you, RTFM.

Our workforce IS NOT FREE.

~~~
aikah
> So before shaming fellow free software coders about what we do and know
> better than you, RTFM.

Calm down, nobody's shaming anybody.

------
howeyc
will the money get split amongst all contributers that ask?

otherwise I'm not sure how I feel about the lead developer getting
contributions but asking to get money to keep for themselves.

~~~
embik
[https://caddyserver.com/download#payment](https://caddyserver.com/download#payment)
says

> Funds are used to pay the author and some developers so they can continue to
> actively develop the project and provide support to you.

> After each fiscal year, funds permitting, we'll hire an external CPA to
> verify the expenditure on the account. Audit results will be made available
> for you to view.

~~~
ckluis
Donations are a hard way to run a business. Wikimedia struggled for years to
keep the servers on. Unstable at best. I would go with a dual-licensed
approach and/or support model.

A tiered support model is a no brainer for most businesses especially if the
lower tiers are relatively cheap. A high-end “bells and whistles” model also
make sense for some companies who use it mission critical scenarios.

~~~
evook
Wikimedia is anything, but not a good example of a well structured
organisation. The Wikimedia organisational structure is bloated and causes a
high monetary overhead. Wikimedia spent $42.1 million between 2012 - 2013.
Even estimated pessimistic that amount of money would be enough to run
Wikipedia for at least the next 30 years with an estimated annual traffic
growth of 10% (too high on purpose[0]). And that's a very(!) pessimistic
calculation I quickly run utilizing our default BI for an international HA
class 5 project.

[0]
[https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm](https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm)

~~~
ckluis
Before they left St Petersburg, Fl for the promised land - their costs were a
lot lower and they still struggled.

------
xaduha
This is a marketing move, which is fine and dandy. But the message isn't 100%
correct. Supporting anything requires resources, true. But that doesn't mean
there aren't plenty of software projects that not only work fine, but once
written require little to no support. I'm mainly talking about this line

> There's no such thing as free software.

~~~
bovermyer
I would say that a web server requires ongoing support to be viable. Any
software that handles network interactions between potentially unknown parties
is inherently in the crosshairs of bad actors. Once a vulnerability is found,
it must be patched, or that software is no longer safe to use.

~~~
xaduha
He says

> There's no such thing as free software.

That's a hyperbole.

He also says

> The question is, "Who pays the price?"

Not everything is done for gain. When someone gives you an apple you're
probably not that concerned about how it came to be, to you that apple is
free. But there's also that added advantage of software - you can copy and
share it just like that with the whole world.

~~~
atonse
I don't think they're saying everything has to be for gain. But there is
definitely the point about "who pays the price" – whether it's the opportunity
cost of lost income from working on caddy, or other price (time with family,
friends, etc).

I do agree with patio11 that it's easier to just have a real support contract.
IMO, one of the model open source projects is Sidekiq. It's become a very
sustainable business for its author.

------
jimjag
This is the reason to, if possible, avoid single-sourced open source projects,
and instead focus on projects that enjoy a large, healthy and diverse
developer community. Volunteer efforts ebb and flow, and it is by growing a
community around a project, that you reduce the risk of open source projects
either going Open Core (ala nginx) or simply fading away due to lack of cycles
and resources.

With all that said, if you depend on Caddy, you should support it.

------
systemz
Giving something for free then creating paywall is IMHO bad idea, can be
frustrating for a lot of people.

You should give something extra for price you want. Just look at Nginx plus
etc. I wanted to use caddy in one of my projects but now I will just use nginx
to have stable product. Sorry.

------
CletusTSJY
Do we need heart to heart talks about why someone charges for a service or why
people need money to support themselves? When I buy cereal at a grocery store
I don't need the clerk to huddle with me and explain how they arrived at the
price or why there's need for a price at all. Just put a price on it and we'll
pay it if it's worth the price.

------
throwaway21816
If it is sponsored by Arroyo networks than why am I paying additional money
for it?

