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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

> And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?

I find that a bit disingenuous. You can't both include annoying headers and argue that they aren't annoying anyone because nobody will see them. If nobody will see them, why add them in the first place?

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I know devs who use Sublime Text almost indefinitely without paying. They don't mind the little "Hey don't forget to buy" popup every once in a while.

We aren't putting popups on your site. :P

No, you're injecting data into traffic. That's way worse than a text editor occasionally reminding you you haven't paid.

Really? I don't see it as any different than an unregistered document editor saving "created with an unregistered version of X" in the comment section of saved documents that it edits. Stuff like that has been going on for decades.

Sure. Some people are fine with using free-as-in-beer software if the "cost" of that is the maker gets some free advertising. Some people -- like many in this thread -- are not ok with that. Both positions are perfectly valid.

To give commercial users an incentive to pay for the open source software they use. Can you name an open source project that does not offer extended features for commercial versions and that sells? Because I can't

Ad headers isn't an extended feature, it's a nag screen.

Removal of ad headers surely counts as a feature then?

No, it counts as a bugfix.

There's a difference between "extended features for commercial versions" and "adware". Usually the open source version includes core features that solve a basic set of problems, and the commercial versions add additional features to solve other and/or larger problems. At no point is there an explicit crippling of the open source.

What's particularly frustrating is the burying of the lede here. The summary of the page intentionally omits the fact that you can build from source and use it in commercial contexts. And the section discussing the Apache license is factually incorrect: "Remember that building Caddy from source is still subject to the Apache 2.0 license which requires attribution and stating changes." -- that is only true if you are selling on-prem software that ships with the program. If you are using it in the normal course of your SaaS, no attribution is required.

Exactly. I would have no issue if paid usage was for things big companies are more likely to need, e.g. support, high-performance features, etc, like nginx does, but this is egregious.

> Can you name an open source project that does not offer extended features for commercial versions and that sells?

pfSense, Ceph (prior to RH purchase) and OpenNebula off the top of my head.

Pfsense does have commercial offering though netgate...

Netgate sells service, hardware and certification, not extra features.

Doesn’t gold membership include extra features?

Looking at it again, it seems their cloud configuration backup service has special client code and could qualify as such. But the primary thing seems to be access to information, the devs and an officially certified VM for AWS.

I think the headers are there so they can see if commercial sites are using the personal version and get them to pony up.

Wouldn't they already know who their customers are?

commercial sites have the easy ability to go to https://github.com/mholt/caddy; download the source; remove the header from header.go and server.go; compile; run

i'd venture to guess many build the binary themselves already. so they can add their own tweaks.

how would anyone be able to prove a website is being ran by caddy if the server doesn't announce that it is caddy?

If you do build it yourself, you don't fall under the commercial license, so it's correct if those are not detected.

It's enough if nobody but the site maintainers will see them, that's what can annoy them into upgrading.

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