If they rephrased it to admit they're moving to a Red Hat model of "pay for binary", the news would have fared better. More straightforward, with a direct comparison to a current, successful brand.
Let's face it: They realized their product was popular, took advantage of tons of interest and documentation/blogs/hype in the community, then decided to charge for binary distribution. It's a bit of a burn.
Or another way of looking at it: Open source has to be subsidized (either through free time or commercial backing) in order to continue to contribute to open source. The amount of time and effort to maintain a popular open source product is insane. They are creating a business model to continue to subsidize their open source contributions. Whats the alternative? Burnout and stagnation which would just result in forks and fracturing of the community if they are lucky.
Yep and Caddy was, $50.000 in 2016 from Mozilla
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/22/mozilla-awards-3850...
Mholt got $50.000 from Mozilla to maintain an open source project as well. It should factor into the discussion.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/22/mozilla-awards-3850...
The only generous people here is Mozilla, especially when they financed a commercial project with open source grants.
The bigger the company is, the more likely they are to go with just building Caddy themselves instead of paying for it. So, the only people who need to run the commercial binaries are the situations where the licensing costs actually matter.
Maybe I'm underestimating the size of the demographic they're targeting, but it seems to me that the only market for Caddy is a fairly small niche of people who are unwilling/unable to run NGINX or set up their own build process.
Big companies are where they're going to buy the licenses because in those companies time is often more kmportnant than budget so you just buy stuff.
Another reason is that as soon as other teams become involved you get comments like "this bug is yours because you self compiled this thing", or "we have to buy the vendors version", etc etc. It's not logical and is basically arse covering. Buying the vendor version is an easy way to shoot down a whole category of stupid internal politics.
It doesn't work quite like that. Unless you're friend with the guy who decides who the checks are signed to, or you are already an established brand or your product provides a value so big it's a no-brainer, nobody in a big company will invest in your solution. If the company can get your product for free it will.
Caddy is trying to cash in on a product that is young, that has everything to prove, while at the same time pissing off the people it relies on to acquire an "audience", the users of the open source version, it never ends well.
The right way to do it is, to leave the open source version as it is, without any license change, while creating a new product,closed source, suited for enterprise.
> "this bug is yours because you self compiled this thing",
never heard anything like that in my life.
> Buying the vendor version is an easy way to shoot down a whole category of stupid internal politics.
If you have the power to do so at your business by all means. Buying into a commercial product also require a crazy amount of politics as well, especially if it's a recurring payment PER month PER instance at a minimum of $50, so more than the price of a basic VM on Amazon.
Just yesterday I was whipping a team because they built their own version of Apache (for dubious reasons) and broke the patch management system.
To quote myself "why the fuck didn't you use the distribution packaged version?? Now go and fix that right now, it is your problem"
I think it pretty much covers the case.
> I think it pretty much covers the case.
I think it pretty much doesnt.
Have you ever maintained a bunch (100 to a few thousand) machines where everyone builds his stuff from scratch according to their under the shower visions ? I have and now I will hit the ones who step one nanometer outside the only true and god provided package, that is straight from the distribution.
And yes - it does cover the case of you NEVER seeing that. Now you have seen.
Off the top of my head, Google requires you to own any new third-party dependencies you pull into the source tree. Therefore, Google engineers think very carefully about their dependencies.
Also, anecdotally, once my team (at a $100M start-up) decided vanilla Rails/ActiveResource didn't fully support our needs and we'd have to fork/extend it, then we needed an owner. That guy was me. Before I took on ownership, we'd simply file issues with the ActiveResource team and offer changesets if we had the free time to debug. When we brought it in internally, I was required to field all support. It definitely cost our company more, obviously, and it would've been much more convenient and possibly much cheaper to rely on a third-party vendor.
And I doubt the same Google would just download some random executable on the net and use it in production instead of doing a extensive source code review and building the executable themselves if they can. My point exactly.
That's not true at all. Big companies pay for software, not small shops. If J Developer says to their boss, "Well, I'd really like to use this thing, but it costs $X" and $X is sufficiently small, companies will frequently just go for it. No technical manager worth their salt is going to argue for their engineers who cost $X0,000 per month to be spending time managing a bespoke build pipeline to get out of paying somebody.
> Maybe I'm underestimating the size of the demographic they're targeting, but it seems to me that the only market for Caddy is a fairly small niche of people who are unwilling/unable to run NGINX or set up their own build process.
The auto-TLS aspect (among many other niceties such as simple configuration) is really quite nice for a large swath of users.
Any technical manager worth their salt won't be letting developers make ops decisions.
Oh right, it's devops so you don't have ops, you have developers who think this is a good deal
There is a fork without the adware now, so the smart company will use the fork to get rid of the stupid ads.
and got granted $50.000 to maintain an open source project. Maybe that person who "worked hard" should give back the money, instead of being a dishonest "prick". And let's be frank, caddy is a fucking mashup. the great majority of its functionalities come from Go std lib or 3rd party libs, maybe caddy should give money back to them and all its contributors as well.
The only alternative is to do the typical VC route, have some startup that makes zero revenue and just hacks on OSS, which is a bigger drain on the economy and I don't believe produces better work anyway.
It's not 2005 any more, Sun Microsystems is long gone. You won't raise any money from a business model that gives away your best work or selling support contracts alone.
Caddy is a real innovation, and brings web server defaults bang up to date - it makes loads of complex configuration easy. It's already distributed in the finest tradition of free software - a liberal source code license with no restrictions. You can do what you want with it.
Like GNU in the 80s and OpenBSD in the 90s, Matt is selling the most convenient package and yeah - if that's the one you used and relied on for your infrastructure, you've got to pay, and not very much.
Matt has clearly worked hard at making that payment support as much as possible in terms of convenient corporate deployment. I really hope that works out well, and am glad it's a business model that supports Free software without any compromises.