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Comment by j-a-a-p | Hacker News Reader

> it's no longer present in current Caddy but the bad taste still remains

Adding a sponsor header is harmless (albeit useless IMO). For me that would be no reason to not choosing this software, and certainly no ground for having a 'bad taste'.

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It is bad taste, unprofessional.

Taints the pool with the vibe of "We can do this; we will do this and you schmucks can't do anything about it because it's in the EULA".

Regardless to how harmless it is. It's still an unprofessional quality to implement such and then deny the ability to disable it.

Same example as if when you honked your cars horn it tooted the car model. You'd be annoyed right?

Sure, its harmless because how often do you use your car horn but you expect a car horn to horn not advertise the model your driving.

I'm imagining a Tesla's horn chiming the Intel "dah dah ding ding" thing now.

Let's hope Elon doesn't read this.

What purpose does it actually fulfil? Who is actually looking at individual HTTP requests like this? All it does is take up extra traffic...

It's also a security risk if your web server is the only one doing it, as it is a way for an attacker to fingerprint the web server software in use.

I understand and agree with melx's view here completely, even if I do feel Caddy's strengths outweigh it's weaknesses.

> Who is looking

devs presumably

Which is exactly the audience we were targeting.

I thought it was a good idea at the time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think it’s a cool idea, though if it’s on by default, disabling it should be obvious like one of the first lines in the config file.

> Adding a sponsor header is harmless

Harmless or not - I think it's worth looking past this point. Maybe the http header was a way for them to search the internet and find *commercial* sites that didn't pay for Caddy license? Not very pro behaviour.

Caddy is licensed under the Apache license, which allows for commercial use. No one is infringing by not paying for the commercial version.

Well, we're in 2017 (read the thread I posted above), and in that year Caddy was distributing[0] the binary as licensed product. Apache licence applied to its source-code only (e.g. when you build the server from source - which only few people did).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180216153020/https://caddyserv...

Thanks for the background. I didn't know it used to be like that. It's a funky licensing scheme if I ever saw one.

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