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Comment by folkrav | Hacker News Reader

I seem to remember Caddy having some features behind a rather restrictive license - or something like that, my memory is failing me - that made me not consider it at all. But it's been a while, easily a handful of years, and looking at it right now, it looks like they changed that. Seems to be all open-source/Apache 2.0 licensed.

Am I crazy or did they really change the licensing situation? Cause it definitely looks pretty interesting, looking at current docs.

Edit: Found it - they did switch to Apache 2.0, remove all usage restrictions and open-sourced it all https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2786

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I sympathize a lot with the licensing story of Caddy. /u/mholt has been a very active maintainer and participant in the larger Go community and has every right to create a commercial side to the project and receive compensation for their work.

But licensing is hard. AWS abused the leniency of Elasticsearch's original OSS license, so now the industry is set back 10 years with new entrants trying to find the balance between inviting community participation and getting gob smacked by big corporate interests.

Im not saying Elastic.co is an angel but its a lesson OSS projects have to take to heart, unfortunately. Thanks Amazon.

I think my favorite reaction to Amazon's aggression is Grafana Labs. They released their code under Affero GPL but let you use a different license if you pay them. Sort of like a new version of the Qt model.

AGPL does nothing to protect commercial projects from AWS. Look at MongoDB: they had been AGPL for a loooong time, but moved to a non-FOSS license specifically because of AWS.

AWS has no problems with giving away the code for any managed-X service they. The magic that they charge for is the managed part - deployment, autoscaling, upgrade management, and other Operations stuff that no FOSS license can compel them to make public.

Interesting context, thank you.

> AWS abused the leniency of Elasticsearch's original OSS license,

They did not abuse anything. Elastic chose a license that allowed everything AWS did. It is Elastics problem if they don't understand licenses.

To clarify, the Caddy source code has always been Apache 2.0 licensed, all the way back to 2014-2015.

Hmm, interesting. I really can't remember what the restrictions were then.

For a time we ran a build service that produced binaries that were commercially licensed if used for business purposes (personal use still free). But that was only with the optional use of our build service. The source code has always been Apache licensed.

Ah! So I guess it was just my junior dev mind that couldn't comprehend the nuances and didn't realize I could just use the open-source version rather than downloading binaries.

Thank you for the info, rather curious about trying it out at this point then. I was about to whip out nginx for a server I wanted to setup over the weekend, guess I'll play around with Caddy then!

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