
Caddy Proposal: Permanently change all proprietary licensing to open source - scrollaway
https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2786
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djsumdog
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?)

~~~
dullgiulio
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.

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ownagefool
As a developer, I like to get paid, but the issue of monetising something you
already gave away for free is more complicated than that and the idea that
somebody can build an effective business on something like caddy is probably a
tad unrealstic.

There's a long list of free shit that we're building on top of. It's a bit
like somebody sticking a cherry ontop of a free cake then trying to charge for
it.

This is why a lot of people just go down the consultancy route. I imagine Matt
Holt will be better off simply from being the author of a famous project.

Don't get me wrong though, if the project can monetise Caddy, all power to
them.

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ignoramous
Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame once wrote a piece called _Better than
Free_ which I think kind of distills key points against competing with
anything that can be had for free on/from the internet [0], which are:

1\. Immediacy (pioneer?)

2\. Personalization (bespoke?)

3\. Interpretation (consultancy?)

4\. Authenticity (brand?)

5\. Accessibility (SaaS?)

6\. Embodiment (concierge/luxury?)

7\. Findability (marketing?)

I'm not sure if anyone else has written abt this, but I'd like to read more.

[0] [https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-
fre/](https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/)

~~~
blattimwind
> Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame once wrote a piece called Better than
> Free which I think kind of distills key points against competing with
> anything that can be had for free on/from the internet [0], which are:

Or maybe, you know, just have a better product. Case in point: NLEs. There are
a whole bunch of free and sometimes open source NLEs, most of which just
aren't particularly good.

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aeorgnoieang
> NLEs

Non-linear editing systems?

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

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instagraham
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 __

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munfred
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...

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atonse
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
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-w...](https://www.ardanlabs.com/news/2019/05/ardan-labs-partners-
with-caddy.html) [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)

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atonse
Point taken. Take my damn upvote :-)

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

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herohamp
I would happily accept sponsored by headers if it meant free commercial use of
caddy

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therein
Even if it looks like this?

> Caddy-Sponsors: This free web server is made possible by its sponsors:
> Minio, Uptime Robot, and Sourcegraph

[https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/pull/1866](https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/pull/1866)

~~~
geodel
What's wrong with this header?

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therein
That PR describes what's wrong pretty thoroughly, some went for the rest of
the community's response. Therefore they backed down.

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coleca
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.

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kemitchell
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
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
Yes this is pretty much how it is. Ardan is a great company.

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IshKebab
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.

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Calashle0202
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
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.

