Merry Christmas Eve!

herronjo Verified (he/him)
12/24/25, 6:46 AM
Edited
As an early Christmas present to everyone, I'm letting the cat out of the bag: https://sprucehttp.com/sources You can now download the source code for SpruceHTTP, as well as easily get the pre-compiled builds! https://sprucehttp.com/download (Currently only Debian packages, more to come). Understand that SpruceHTTP is pre-release software and, while mostly stable, does have quirks and bugs that will eventually be fixed. Please do report what you find! Also know that some bugs may have fixes in the works that have not yet been committed. Documentation to come later, you can read the TypeScript definitions for help on creating your config file for now. Enjoy!
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herronjo Verified (he/him)
12/24/25, 6:51 AM
Edited
Q&A: Q: Can I use this for free? And even make money? A: Yes. Just don't make over $1 million with it without giving a little back :) Q: Why the weird license? A: I generally like FOSS, but I really just don't want the hassle of dealing with forks and external contributions. I'll release most things under a FOSS license, but Spruce is not one of those things - at this time. You can have the source and read it, I don't care. Q: Why not FOSS? A: Maybe in the future. I've put too much work in so far to just want to give it away for free to companies with no expectation of compensation, but I have no issue with people using it personally for free, or even making small amounts of money using it. Q: This license is weird and custom. A: I didn't feel that existing licenses covered what I was looking to do: let normal people use this for free, but require large companies to pay, and prevent the maintenance pain that proper open source brings (i.e. forks and dealing with ownership of external contributions). Q: Isn't this anti-archival? A: I made sure the license allows for redistributing binaries, and even generously release this into public domain should STiBaRC cease to exist or SpruceHTTP be abandoned. You're allowed to hold onto old versions of sources for as long as you like, and when this is public domain-ed you can release them as much as you'd like. If you think I should do more to allow archival to happen, let me know! Q: What's your deal with forks? A: I personally find forks that don't make substantial enough changes, or do but keep the name, to cause issues with troubleshooting and documentation. I don't want to document other people's changes, let alone solve problems that aren't my fault. If you want to make changes to Spruce, you're allowed to, just keep them to yourself. If you REALLY want to make those changes public, just talk to me about it, I'll probably let you.
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