It's regrettable that our announcement today is so controversial. As much as a donation model is easy and safe, it is not a business plan. (We tried it.)
> and I'm not convinced that the "variety of reasons" are compelling.
I really don't want to be a jerk here, but you don't need to be convinced. If the general community feels a certain way, and you wish for said community to favor you, you must abide.
Nobody is "expecting" you to make good software, we're just saying that now that you've turned a formally mostly decent piece of software into adware with an untrustworthy author there's no reason to not just use better software. Software that doesn't molest your traffic. I wish you luck with your business but don't know why anybody would pay for software written by you two ever again.
We switched to OpenResty lately for our nginx bundle and it changes the nginx Server header to OpenResty, and I cared so little I didn't even bother to put a sed command in our install script to change it. It could say Diet Pepsi Uh Huh It's The One.. who cares? Maybe I'm going to do that with the next update just to make a point. The only reason anybody would even notice is because I told them about it.
FOSS is in serious trouble right now because the funding model is in shambles, and the only way we get anything good funded now is if the megacorps decide to fund something. We need to find better ways for the little guys to put food on their tables, or we're doomed as a community. We tried direct payments to FOSS devs, and that went up in flames. These guys came up with a clever and unintrusive way to advertise (really just to show sponsors, which isn't really even advertising) to tech people, and instead of being supportive of a novel way to fund their project everybody screams bloody murder at them.
If the FOSS community wants to continue to exist as a venue for quality software, the first step it needs to take is to stop chewing its own arms off. Please have a perspective here and understand that these developers are just trying to make a living, just like all of us are. The only thing worse than starving to death making something free for other people is doing it while they sit there and hate you for trying to figure out how to put food on the table. All the quality people will leave FOSS forever, and we'll be stuck with a bunch of random unmaintained garbage and bizarro overengineered UI crap Facebook wants to publish to status compete with Google's bizarro overengineered UI crap, and we'll all be worse off for it.
Injecting any data into network traffic is unacceptable.
> Please have a perspective here and understand that these developers are just trying to make a living, just like all of us are.
Sure. I also work on an open source project for a living. But modifying network traffic should not be an accepted form of DRM IMO. I fully support a pricing model. If this change hadn't prompted me to rip out Caddy and replace with nginx I would have paid the Caddy team instead of paying nginx which I do now.
They have the right to do it, but it was a foolish mistake if their goal is to get and retain customers.