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Comment by embik | Hacker News Reader

https://caddyserver.com/download#payment says

> Funds are used to pay the author and some developers so they can continue to actively develop the project and provide support to you.

> After each fiscal year, funds permitting, we'll hire an external CPA to verify the expenditure on the account. Audit results will be made available for you to view.

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Donations are a hard way to run a business. Wikimedia struggled for years to keep the servers on. Unstable at best. I would go with a dual-licensed approach and/or support model.

A tiered support model is a no brainer for most businesses especially if the lower tiers are relatively cheap. A high-end “bells and whistles” model also make sense for some companies who use it mission critical scenarios.

It sounds like Caddy is a side project for the author, so there probably isn't time for tiered support in addition to development.

Wikimedia is anything, but not a good example of a well structured organisation. The Wikimedia organisational structure is bloated and causes a high monetary overhead. Wikimedia spent $42.1 million between 2012 - 2013. Even estimated pessimistic that amount of money would be enough to run Wikipedia for at least the next 30 years with an estimated annual traffic growth of 10% (too high on purpose[0]). And that's a very(!) pessimistic calculation I quickly run utilizing our default BI for an international HA class 5 project.

[0] https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm

Before they left St Petersburg, Fl for the promised land - their costs were a lot lower and they still struggled.

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