Doesn't this mean that you can simply compile Caddy from source, and avoid having to pay for commercial use? Most Caddy users are likely going be comfortable with compiling stuff, so what benefits does paying bring besides private plugin hosting?
Commercial licenses would only cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year if your organization has at least 160 instances in use. Keep in mind that modifying the source is required to plug in any plugins, which people tend not to want to bother with.
We're also looking into adding more features for our customers.
I've only ever used Caddy without plugins, so I'm not familiar with how it works but do you mean that plugins in general must be enabled or that the specific set of plugins I want must be compiled in? If the latter then I think they are not so much plugins as some kind of extension.
Please clarify, thanks.
I'm not familiar with Go, so I can't modify source to get the plugins I like.
I read the announcement page, and can't find what the cost is, but it doesn't matter. My work doesn't count as non-x, because I want to someday make an extra income from it.
I've found Caddy to be a cool and interesting project, but guess I'll be switching Nginx back on soon enough :(
The pricing is on our pricing page: https://caddyserver.com/pricing
If your commercial venture isn't profitable yet, we will try to help you bootstrap. Just email us, sales@lightcodelabs.com and we'll see what we can do.
That's a pretty big if. The one time I had to compile the server from source (to help you test a bugfix), I had the Go toolchain installed (which not everyone does) and I still couldn't figure out how to compile with some of the plugins I wanted. I gave up after 30 minutes of not getting anywhere, IIRC.
I think this move has lost you a lot of goodwill from people.
And there's the rub: even for as smart as lots of HN readers are (and, likely, as most Caddy users are), why are you forcing folks to do something that isn't standard? Why force people to go about awkward, ugly manual steps to avoid something that didn't even exist a few hours ago?
Loads of incredibly tech folks on HN (and that would be interested in Caddy to start with). Yet most of us explicitly do not "build from source" most of the time: it's too susceptible to breakage; doesn't play nicely with `yum upgrade`; etc.
Can we "build from source"? Sure.
But why should we have to to avoid something you've added - apparently - just to assuage your sponsors?
Charge for it. That's cool - I pay for quality stuff.
But adware? that's a crap move.
Think Red Hat Linux.