Hacker News Reader

Comment by ash | Hacker News Reader

> We now require declaring a license when requesting a download: > https://caddyserver.com/download/<os>/<arch>?license=persona... > The value for the license variable can be either personal or commercial. > … > We require the license parameter because we feel it's important for the license to be deliberate, not assumed. To ease the transition into this, though, we'll allow the current syntax (no license parameter) to work for at least 30 more days, and a personal license will be assumed.

I think this warning should be more prominent. Lot's of CI builds would mysteriously fail after 30+ days.

View on HN

I'll work on that. But the error message is very clear, so if any error reporting is enabled, it'll be pretty obvious what to do, at least.

The fact that people were relying on volunteer-supported infrastructure for their CI builds is a little unnerving to me, hence the move to commercial support.

Why not upload them to GitHub?

Exactly, building and pushing to GitHub is a set-and-forget process. Besides, it already needs to be done for paying customers now so what kind of work is that saving Caddy? I don't understand.

EDIT: Additionally, it's an error to think that non-paying customers are not contributing. It's actually a pretty basic misunderstanding for an open source company. Users are contributing with bug reports, small fixes, testing, marketing, etc. It amazes me we still see this feeling in 2017. I dare all companies with open source projects to actually close them and replace non-paying customers with QA teams, more developers, more infrastructure, etc. Make sure to increase your budgets and raise your prices accordingly.

Answering my own question: it is now my understanding that caddy relies on a custom build system to generate custom builds on the fly for its plugins. Publishing all combinations on GH wouldn't make much sense given the combination explosion for any new plugin.

That's excellent. Most people don't seem to use plugins so a default build is enough for them. Those who need it have a business need now and can either setup their own build system or pay Caddy for that. Value is generated as opposed to being subtracted (from the current status quo).

More than 50% of Caddy downloads have at least one plugin. 1 and 2 plugins are the most common of those that have at least one.

That's impressive and a sizable customer base. I hope it works for you, Caddy is impressive and more competition is always good.

Is this move the result of open source burnout?

There are better ways to structure a business around an open source project.

Besides comprehensive support plans, you could actually pursue dual licensing (if you own the copyright to all contributions, I couldn't find a CLA), consulting services, etc. This is all in the playbook followed by nginx, Red Hat and others.

I think even the dreaded "open core" model would give yours users less friction than what you're implementing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com