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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

You're right, you can build from source under the Apache license. Keeping the project truly open source is really important to us, because the community is such a great part of using Caddy.

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.

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I pay $149 a month for a server, I was using Nginx + nghttp2 (for gRPC), until last month when I switched to Caddy (LE benefits).

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 Caddy source code is Apache licensed, so if you build from source, you're good to go. That's the point: we know there are many projects that are just a little side income here and there, so you should be able to build your own Caddy binary from source and use it.

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.

> if you build from source, you're good to go.

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.

>a pretty big if. The one time I had to compile the server from source...couldn't figure out how to compile with some of the plugins

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?

> so if you build from source, you're good to go

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.

> Keep in mind that modifying the source is required to plug in any plugins, which people tend not to want to bother with.

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.

It involves adding an import, and the plugin registers itself. Extension/plugin/addon -- call them what you will, I guess. We chose the term "plugin" before Go 1.8 had its experimental plugin package that, on Linux, allows dynamic linking of libraries. (There are a lot of limitations with that, for now.) In Caddy, all plugins are statically linked and compiled in.

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