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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Very important excerpt:

> Beginning today, commercial licenses are no longer required for commercial use of any Caddy binaries.

I don't understand the change. If I understand the history correctly, previously commercial usage restrictions only applied to official binaries downloaded from their site, and now:

>Going forward, only commercial use of ... the download page ... requires a subscription

So now you're allowed to commercially use the official binaries without buying a license, but you're not allowed to acquire them without that license? I don't really understand how that's a distinction with any difference.

Is the expectation that (non-commercial) 3rd-parties will mirror the official binaries, and that's why it's a useful change?

> Now that version 1.0 is tagged, we will see about working on integrations with Digital Ocean, various Linux distros and package managers, and making an official Docker container.

So it seems that if you use the Docker container or an APT repository, there is no need for a subscription. However if you pull from their infrastructure you need to pay. Interesting way to muddy the waters and extract money from those who don't understand the situation.

That's not correct. To clarify the facts:

- You can always build from source, and you could have always built from source, for free, for commercial use, since the source code is and has always been Apache licensed.

- 3rd-party distribution channels such as Digital Ocean images, Linux package managers, Docker, etc, have nothing to do with commercial or free use.

- Using our official download page (or getcaddy.com) for commercial purposes requires a subscription.

The Caddy source code is hosted on GitHub, not on your infrastructure AFAICT. If that changed, then what you wrote is different from what I wrote. Otherwise, nothing written in the previous comment differs from what you just wrote.

Your comment does not qualify "need to pay", which is only required for commercial users.

If Caddy is as unpopular as HN makes it look, then that's probably nobody. Right?

Just to be clear: it seems that the same exact binaries distributed via a docker image or through standard distro packages managers are free for commercial use. The difference is that obtaining it from you directly costs money. This is a part of the business model that HN users would likely find distasteful. You're charging people who aren't technically competent enough to realize that other places offer the same exact binaries for free. Why even permit the side channels in the first place?

That's also an incorrect characterization. Those 3rd-party channels do not give you the power to customize Caddy the way our build infrastructure does. Try customizing Caddy with plugins through apt or DO images and let us know if you find a way to do that!

I understand other projects have similar compilation requirements but now you're just spinning a technical difficulty as a feature.

The fact people are still having trouble understanding your licensing terms should give you pause.

Are they still putting ads in the headers?

No ads, that's been long gone, but there's still a "Server: Caddy" header. That's easily removed with "header / -Server" in your Caddyfile. Note that it isn't removed from redirects from HTTP to HTTPS, which is an edgecase, if you're concerned about that (you shouldn't be, honestly).

It's a shame that I only learned when they added the ads and not when they removed them.

Merci

Yeah, it's a shame that the bad publicity gets more visibility than the good on HN sometimes.

That's not only on HN, it's everywhere and should be quite expected as a fact of life.

That's why companies are usually careful about damaging their reputations (just like humans): earning points is much harder.

After customers have written your company off, it'll take much more resources to bring them back.

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