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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, they aren't 'needs' just nice-to-haves that are provided for free with other open-source software. Thus, when trying to choose technology for personal projects, people don't choose your software. They choose a 'competitor.' Thus when it comes time to choose software with a green-field or startup, the non-free solution isn't chosen because devs aren't familiar with it.

Literally, at work (a startup), we use Traefik (which is horrible imho) instead of nginx (which I've used literally everywhere else) because the devs who originally started this project had never used it on a personal project.

So the issue isn't paying for it, it is about making it useful enough for personal projects that people use it for personal projects that it then gets used on professional projects. Right now, it is barely useful for personal projects unless you know what you're doing.

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This is a great point. People use Caddy because for simple cases the configuration is seemingly "easy", and more importantly it includes Let's Encrypt out of the box. I've tried to argue with these users that nginx has many powerful (and necessary) features, to no avail. Traefik is a similar story: It integrates neatly with Consul for service discovery so it's a go-to tool for TLS termination in front of a service mesh.

Do I personally need DNS SRV support? No, I have a templated Nomad config that will re-render and reload the nginx config if the consul upstreams change. Setting this up though is definitely a bigger hurdle than just specifying a Consul service as an upstream.

I mean, if nginx offered a free personal license that worked on 5 servers (which would match up to Ubuntu Pro's free personal license), I'd be all over that. I have 3 servers and I'm very unlikely to dish out $500 a month, per server, to get nginx+, but I could sell that to my employer if I was already familiar with the technology or could convince my coworkers to go give it a try and see what they thought.

It seems they're more interested in high-touch sales (which is unlikely to happen on a dev team), vs. organic growth.

There is of course the issue of consistency: you can't be said to believe in free software (which is an ideology based around the rights of users) if you operate a proprietary software vendor.

A vendor that releases some free software and some proprietary software is a proprietary software vendor. (This describes, for example, both Microsoft and nginx.)

Yes, but people have to be ABLE to pay for your software. I simply cannot afford nginx+ for a hobby, and I'm a "free" asset when I make decisions for a company that CAN pay. Also, a startup may use the 'personal' license pre-revenue, then when it is time to scale up, they have to pay. Their features are coupled to your product, and they are going to pay because they have to (or rewrite a lot of code), a 'trial' simply isn't going to allow this to happen.

Maybe "these users" are not as braindead as you think? nginx still defaults to settings that made sense in 2005. I usually go for caddy now not because I am not familiar with nginx, but because it doesn't require me to drop hundreds of lines of config across a dozen of includes to get a properly configured HTTP server. Automation doesn't make much sense in our use case, and it gets tiring maintaining a separate ansible playbook just for nginx setup.

Caddy has sane defaults for many settings and I only need to add a couple of response headers, drop the domain name, and where to proxy the requests to. It takes care of maintaining things like the list of TLSv1.2 ciphersuites.

Adding more domains takes two lines of config thanks to parameterized includes — another important thing nginx misses that has to be implemented manually via scripts using something like envsubst (or again, full-on automation which is problematic if many of your servers are just a little bit different from each other — for good reasons).

Apache httpd has it by the way: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_macro.html

FYI, Caddy has DNS SRV support for free. https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/reverse_pr...

Or maybe, just maybe, devs are sick of software that pretends it’s still 1995. Nginx is awful to work with, and has an awful community.

The cherry on top is the OpenResty “community”. You know the one that call you an idiot for not pretending Lua is orgasmically good; the one that declares you “just” implement thousands of lines of code because there’s no possible way a useful library could exist; the one with the ecosystem full of awful, worse than js leftpad garbage that hasn’t been updated in three years.

Give me a break. F nginx and openresty.

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