I'm personally happy Matt is charging for his work. More open-source devs should charge for commercial use a la Sidekiq, ngrok, and Caddy.

Free OSS is great, but for these types of tools, so is paid OSS.

There's a large pool of small, useful dev tools that could be making money instead of begging for it. And I'm glad Matt is a part of the much smaller group that makes money.

I have no qualms about commercial services either, it's just a very different model here compared to nginx (which is about the closest comparison project I can think of).

Huh? Nginx also has a commercial license, Nginx Plus.

https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx/

I was suggesting the drama caused previously was due to the confusing way it was handled - pay to avoid a header, or to use "official" binaries.

I'm well aware that nginx has a commercial side, which is why I mentioned it as a comparison.

I’m surprised it survived the commercial rollout. AFAICT, the commercial rollout required $300/year per instance for any and all commercial usage. It made it sound like you weren’t even allowed to use the open source version for commercial use (is that even possible?).

You're free to do anything with the source code that's permitted by the Apache license, including commercial usage. The commercial licensing only affects the binaries offered on the site.

I'd agree that it wasn't very well-handled and being the biggest hassle for the wrong kind of people, but I believe it always clearly talked about their binaries only.

The commercial licence for the prebuilt binaries is $50 pm for 2 instances. You can build yourself from source with no restrictions.

OK, I see the requirement to pay is only for the binaries. It does seem like grabbing binaries from gocaddy.com is the preferred installation method vs. apt-get, etc for nginx.

$300 is the annual rate for 1 instance.