Even the time required to negotiate a custom commercial license costs more than the license is worth (and/or more than the switching cost) for most personal users.

I was using Caddy because I don't have time in my day to configure Nginx; but I also don't have time in my day to build Caddy from source to repackage+deploy it to my infrastructure. So back to Nginx it is.

What I would have time in my day for is a standardized one-time PayPal payment in exchange for a commercial license authorizing me to use Caddy for a site with traffic not exceeding [X amt any commercial site would quickly hit]. You know, like buying an SMB license of any other on-prem web-service software.

you don't have time to recompile a software package but you do have time to read hackernews?

is time the right word here?

My job pays me units of money in exchange for a finite time per day spent dedicated to advancing their goals. There are more potential things to do for the company than fit into the time they pay me to spend; and I'm not going to work for free past that time just to fit all those things in. Therefore, I have to optimize—to choose which things are most worth the company's time. Compiling and configuring software packages are rather low on that list (which shouldn't be surprising, given that I'm a programmer, not an ops person.)

I read HN on my own time.

In the time it probably took you to type that comment, I compiled caddy from source. I've never even used it before, but in general Go programs are very easy to build.

> but in general Go programs are very easy to build.

So long as you organise all your code according to GOPATH. You can't just compile it in your Downloads folder.

Yes I think the GOPATH is bullshit but it's also not hard to move files from one directory to another.