Not to mention the salary that most developers make, paying $25-100/m for software you enjoy is not much. IMHO if you can't justify the price, then don't use it.
Running three static sites in their own containers, plus a fourth Caddy as a reverse proxy, and your laptop? That's $250/mo. Is a buddy of yours also working on one of those sites? Oops, now you're at the $500/mo (10 license) tier.
I regret to inform people, but the world isn't free. Open source is great because it's a low barrier for people getting started with a business or project, but if a company benefits from it they should pay.
This sort of duel license fragmentation is unfortunately the only option for people like us trying to make a living from OSS.
It's totally within rights, and the rates are completely reasonable for funded or profitable ventures. I'm just bummed that I can't quickly grab a Caddy binary and toss it in a container to help host, e.g., a little Bugzilla dashboard / frontend without worrying that I'm violating the "business use" or "internal company use" clauses.
I've used Apache, Lighttpd, Cherokee, and Nginx over the years, and this is the first time that an open source webserver has asked me to make a commercial/noncommercial distinction when using the core software. And while I could compile the OSS version, switching back to Nginx is a lower friction, simpler option.
On the upside, these decisions are mutable, and Caddy is excellent software produced by really great, reasonable people. I'm sure the kinks will get worked out eventually.
I feel kind of bad for the authors here, the rollout of this hasn't been perfect. Right now they're suffering the wrath of folks angry at what they perceive as a bait and switch. (Although I think that's a little harsh also, given that you can compile your own for free)
It seems like they would probably have been better selling it as a commerical venture from the get-go as a niche premium version of nginx.
Of course, then it's harder to gain ground that way.
The good part is, if you can't justify the price, surely you can justify the time to write a bash script to compile it yourself? Further up this comments page is one fantastic example. There's still plenty of options, really, not much has changed.
Seeing people complain about paying for software is just annoying. They should work for free then, if that's their mentality.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/06/22/mozilla-awards-3850...
Mozilla should have given the money to another project.