Yep, anyone is free to charge whatever amount for whatever service/feature they offer. But apparently, in this case, the backlash against Caddy's move is greater than the willingness to pay for the service rendered (building binaries without the sponsor header).
Matt's post, and a lot of comments here on HN defending Matt, are missing the point: yes, there was vitriol, and yes, people reacted in a way that was disproportional to the announced changes, but in the end the most important take-away is that people are _not_ willing to pay for the product and are angry because of the changes and the way they were handled. This will cost Caddy a lot of business. Period.
In my opinion Matt should have done one of two things:
- Own up to his mistake (if he agrees it's a mistake)
- Stand by his choices, grow a pair, and laugh at the community for their silliness
What he did instead, is play the victim. He's not a victim. He tries to run a business. That alone will always alienate people. Deal with it!
Matt cannot pay his bills with them.
The underlying message is "shut up and deal with it," which is also unhelpful. People can feel how they feel, and there is no shame in expressing those feelings in a productive way.
What he is not however, he is not doormat that would pretend to laugh when being lied about, when his oss credentials are attacked, etc. Neither he is refraiming what he considers "vitriol" as "silly community". The two expressions have two different meanings. You may disagree about characterisation, of course, but it seems that you don't. You just want him not to talk about it.
Demanding that he pretends issues are what he does not considers them to be is to demand he becomes a coward and poisons the community with feel good lies.
A hypothetical -- but certainly possible -- scenario: $distro (e.g. Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu) takes the Caddy source, removes the controversial header, builds a binary package, and distributes it as "caddy" via their standard repositories. Light Code Labs doesn't approve of this and asks/demands that $distro stop using the trademark. $distro now has to make a choice: remove the "unapproved" changes from their package, stop distributing their package, or rebrand the software under a different name.
(That potentially could have happened here [2,3] but it was quickly resolved well before it got to that point.)
I don't think "it doesn't" is correct -- at least not for 100% of cases.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_b...
[1]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622
Yep, that is how open source works. Note the 'source' there? Anyone is free to charge for compiled binaries. If this compilation has added bonuses (e.g. including plugins) that gives people a reason to pay for that compilation. In any case, those that don't like it can just compile the project themselves.
What exactly do you think was misleading about this move?