It's obviously not going to be the next big IPO. If he can make some money back for his time however, good for him.
If his project is useless, people would not get so upset.
There is a market for his product. Nginx and Apache already own that market. His differentiator is being easy to install. Puppet et. al. solve ease-of-use for large corporations with the budget. The niche that cares about being easy to install is the niche with no money and nobody to pawn it off on. That niche is also passionate and loud.
If he could make some money back for his time, he would already have had a business here.
This business idea is essentially selling pre-made cardboard signs to the homeless. If they have the money, they aren't homeless; if they don't, well, they already make their own signs.
Not just easy to install. Easy to install, maintain and extend. Those properties clearly have value, not just for those who can't afford to pay licence costs.
The idea there's no market for Caddy is clearly false. As referenced in the linked article, there are already uses of it in commercial organisations, something you're suggesting can't possibly exist as "Nginx and Apache already own that market".
The only criticisms I'd make is that the price is too high (in my opinion) and there should've been prior warning given before switching to a paid model, so that companies could budget for it in advance. However, that doesn't mean they won't have paying customers. Note that they've already got commercial sponsors.
Maybe others have different experiences...
As a reference, you can see the current pricing structure for Caddy here:
https://caddyserver.com/pricing
Note that the limited time introductory price is still more expensive over a year than paying a consultant for a couple of days to tweak NGINX.
I might be totally off on that, but from my outside impression, there were a bunch of projects suggesting Caddy as a frontend for APIs (to get HTTPS etc), which would often be in a commercial environment. On one hand, great potential sources of customers, on the other hand it seems those using "new" projects like Caddy also are current on other practices: A lot of those projects seemed to be big on container-based deployments. In the HN thread already there were announcements of just building Caddy in the Dockerfiles (or other places of CI/CD) instead of using the official binaries. Once that has happened in one place, it seems likely that would be adopted widely (especially if a project is suggesting Caddy officially, it'll likely include those, since it doesn't want to require users to get Caddy licenses)
On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who were looking for a simple server for their personal or small-ish projects.
Some are go enthusiasts at the same time: building Caddy likely isn't a big issue for them, if they don't do it already because they tinker with plugins. Some others already use Docker etc, they also likely can switch easily to some process of building it.
Others likely aren't, some aren't even much of developers or admins in general, and really were attracted to Caddy because of how simple it is to use (or it was recommended to them on that basis, e.g. as I've done to some people that are more designers or front-end devs). For those, nothing changes if it is just private use and they don't care about the sponsor-header. Otherwise, both options are pretty bad: Suddenly learning how to patch and compile Go projects is, while doable, exactly the kind of thing they wanted to avoid by choosing Caddy. The commercial pricing also is way to high for that: Spending >1k$ on a webserver for a freelancers homepage or a toy project just doesn't make any sense at all. EDIT: Some of the comments regarding "open-source community" also point towards this. Not all your users are open-source developers which consider compiling yourself trivial.
This last group is the one for which the changes are the most annoying, and at the same time the group I before thought Caddy was targeting primarily. It likely makes sense for a commercial offering to target other users, but it isn't surprising when this group is making noise.
Somewhere inbetween seems to be where Caddy's commercial pricing was targeting: Commercial, using a few Caddy instances for something profitable, and willing to pay over going through efforts to avoid doing so/interested in getting support. Similar to Nginx Plus customers.
(Again, I might be totally misreading the situation here, since I'm not exactly part of the community, and certainly not every user falls into these categories)
To quote from the article:
> This was the worst part of this experience, and is akin to abuse. Demands or demanding comments stem from the misconception that users are entitled to FOSS. This behavior also stems from a misconception, but a different one: that open source maintainers depend on, or need, their open source projects.
For most maintainers or project owners, this is FALSE! > snip > as well as any comment insinuating that the maintainer is reliant upon a project that is not profitable or sustainable. Here’s the brutal truth for 99.9% (* not an actual figure) of open source projects, folks: you (the user of an open source project) need and rely on the project more than the maintainers do. Do not make the mistake of thinking that maintainers are emotionally tied to their projects. Definitely don’t call it their ‘baby’.
I feel like this is a maybe-true comment on the link in general, but not the post you're replying to: entitlement/general nastiness towards open source maintainers is very common, as is the misconception about their degrees of commitment to their projects. That's true whether or not a project switches to a paid model, and whether or not maintainers post what you refer to as "lectures".
Alternatively, you think things should be free and get angry when people want to get something for their efforts.
Is it because it's user-facing instead of an infrastructure component?
Here's a blunt truth. If it's easy for me to ditch your product, your product has no value. 90% of the comments here on HN amounted to "gee, I guess I have to spend an extra 20 minutes configuring Nginx now." Solving 20 minutes of Nginx configuration is not a viable business. System configuration is handled by some Puppet library author. Who's going to spend $100 on your product so they don't have to spend $20 on a non-free SSL certificate?
You're friends with the RethinkDB developers? The moral of their story was even if you have a compelling product, even if you have an interesting niche, even if you give it away for free, even if you give away the source code, even if you have features nobody else has, if you are entering a saturated market you are facing a massive, time-consuming, expensive up-hill battle. Moving away from RethinkDB to Postgres is hard. There are things RethinkDB does that Postgres just doesn't do. But people did this anyway instead of paying, instead of contributing.
Moving away from Caddy is simple. Your product barely even exists. That's why you're having trouble making money. Solve a real problem and you'll make real money.