Short answer: Yep. And even for developers in western countries there is still the hassle of pushing it through purchasing.
Long answer, hopefully really thoughtful and careful as I've had time to think this through:
I think I remember sponsoring Caddy when it was still an open source project. Not much, maybe USD25 or 35 or something (dinner level or something I think it said).
Also I think they got a grant or sponsorship from Mozilla.
I never used it though, I only donated because I was enthusiastic about him creating a nice open source project that I would likely use in the future.
Next I know it is a commercial project, more or less (it took a while before I realized he had left a way around it and it seemed entirely intentional that it wasn't obvious.)
So now I have helped someone start a business, which is nice but not what I thought I did when I donated to a permissively licensed open source project. (I thought I was helping create a new Apache server.)
Still no big problems so far in my case, I'm lucky that USD25 is not much in my case and he probably deserved it even if it left a small sour taste right there and then.
The bigger problem is I never started using Caddy because when I came back to use Caddy I had to consider if my use case would be OK, if I would have to pay a license (which is fine with me but an extra hassle as it has to got through my boss) and suddenly it was very easy to fall back to Apache.
Suddenly instead of helping kickstart an open source project around a product I loved I've helped start a business with a product that I can't use.
Long answer, hopefully really thoughtful and careful as I've had time to think this through:
I think I remember sponsoring Caddy when it was still an open source project. Not much, maybe USD25 or 35 or something (dinner level or something I think it said).
Also I think they got a grant or sponsorship from Mozilla.
I never used it though, I only donated because I was enthusiastic about him creating a nice open source project that I would likely use in the future.
Next I know it is a commercial project, more or less (it took a while before I realized he had left a way around it and it seemed entirely intentional that it wasn't obvious.)
So now I have helped someone start a business, which is nice but not what I thought I did when I donated to a permissively licensed open source project. (I thought I was helping create a new Apache server.)
Still no big problems so far in my case, I'm lucky that USD25 is not much in my case and he probably deserved it even if it left a small sour taste right there and then.
The bigger problem is I never started using Caddy because when I came back to use Caddy I had to consider if my use case would be OK, if I would have to pay a license (which is fine with me but an extra hassle as it has to got through my boss) and suddenly it was very easy to fall back to Apache.
Suddenly instead of helping kickstart an open source project around a product I loved I've helped start a business with a product that I can't use.