[conradk]

It's amazing the lack of gratefulness some people have for open source devs. Matt Holt, which I don't know nor have ever met, has spend a tremendous amount of time developing Caddy and making it available for free. It's creating a lot of value, regardless of what you think of recent telemetry announcements.

And still, apparently, some people will use the slightest disagreement to say that the whole project is garbage, just like this article is doing. I think we're lucky that open source developers don't get deterred by these kinds of article, because they sure could be. What does religion have to do with the quality of a free software project ? Does your server run better if coded by an atheist ?

Instead of being disdainful, a more constructive thing to do would be to openly talk about forking, on Caddy's forum, and see the response. If nothing changes, fork and convince people that your fork is better.

[pmlnr]

Being able to fork in case of disagreements is a feature of open source, not a bug.

Some of these forks get re-merged a few years later (see ffmpeg), others don't, but this is not bad at all.

The ideal solution would be to build Caddy with flags that disable telemetry, just like Firefox is built for Debian.

[detaro]

There's a difference between announcing a fork with "we disagree with the following upstream decisions and thus are making this fork that will remove them" and broadcasting widely something along the lines of "I hate this, it's totally unacceptable, it's done, could someone fork it for us?" though, smearing all kind of barely related things into it.

[conradk]

Totally! Forks can be great.

Saying "Caddy was supposed to be great" or "This is no longer just a conversation on privacy; this is a hostage situation" is not right. Caddy is great, but Neflabs doesn't agree with the direction it's taking. The solution is not describing the free software's developer as a hostage taker.

The solution, as you said, is forking.

[astrodust]

Apache httpd is itself a (patchy) fork of NCSA httpd.

[rrdharan]

It's hard to imagine a productive forking discussion taking place on Caddy's forums directly. Certainly not in that announcement.

At any rate having read this article I didn't see anything saying that "the whole project was garbage".

The video (which Matt Holt removed) is also actually worth watching IMO, although I can see why he doesn't want it posted on the forum given its tone.

[deskamess]

The video has a personality calling Matt an 'asshole'. That was unnecessary. Once that statement was made, I do not blame Matt for removing it. Name calling is not the way to go about addressing this important issue. It is indeed unfortunate that it has tainted what was otherwise a useful point of view.

[rrdharan]

Agree. They also call him a 'dick', repeatedly, and insinuate that he possibly has plans to monetize the gathered data. It escalates quickly and sadly I think all of that speculation and name-calling merely detracts from the strength and importance of the argument.

[neflabs]

Matt said in his statement above, "I haven't actually watched the video" so the truth is, he removed it simply because he asked the community for feedback and decided to censor any opinion which didn't agree with his goals.