[HN Gopher] Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies
___________________________________________________________________
Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies
Author : alanwreath
Score : 650 points
Date : 2021-08-31 15:53 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| mikeflynn wrote:
| My team and I use Docker Desktop and I don't think anyone signs
| in. We just use it to install the docker cli tools on the Mac.
|
| We're a small dev team, but it seems like nothing is changing at
| all for those of us who don't sign in to Docker.
| ibly31 wrote:
| It's free anyway if you sign in and your company is less than
| 250 employees and less than $10mil in revenue
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Is the docker for Mac fixed yet? Last time I checked there were
| issues with disk mounting which really affected performance
| jcoder wrote:
| Reading this I was thinking I would wake up tomorrow and go back
| to using `docker-machine` and a separate VM for development on my
| work mac. Interesting timing that they started the work to
| deprecate/remove `docker-machine` three weeks ago:
| https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/245
| coding123 wrote:
| As weird as it might seem, Microsoft would probably be the best
| company to acquire Docker at this point.
|
| They could probably turn this around a bit into a free with
| Windows, pay for Linux (at the 250 employee level - possibly up
| the employee count to 500 though).
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Nah, they should just build a vscode plugin that makes it easy
| to manage docker running inside WSL2. Bam, Docker Desktop is a
| beached whale.
| hbn wrote:
| > free with Windows, pay for Linux
|
| Isn't Docker Desktop (i.e. the part being sold) just a client
| that sets up a Linux VM to run the free part?
| acro5piano wrote:
| Just use Linux desktop
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I can see Microsoft or Amazon stepping into this space. If GitHub
| desktop is anything to go by, getting [MS][AWS]Container Desktop
| as a replacement for Docker desktop would be a no brainer. 90% of
| what Docker Desktop does is already available in VSCode in some
| form, just the janky GUI is missing.
|
| Somebody else already did the hard work to get it going with
| WSL2, why not just cut out the 3rd party you don't need and put
| it together so the command lines were compatible and your
| existing tooling works. AWS and Microsoft both have skin in this
| game and Docker Desktop would be right in their sights.
|
| On something like Debian, you don't even get a desktop gui and
| you don't miss it either. No reason why WSL2 or a mac shouldn't
| be exactly the same.
| [deleted]
| antonyh wrote:
| I see this as an opportunity to play with Podman. I don't fall
| into the category where I'll need to pay, but Docker Desktop has
| long been somewhat user-hostile.
|
| The forced updates I HATE. It's my machine, I get to pick the
| version of software it runs. And I've had enough bad updates from
| Docker to get jittery when it pushes one on me.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You can use a remote docker host pretty easily. I've been playing
| with qemu on my mac since I read the announcement regarding
| docker for mac no longer being free (as in beer). I have port
| 5555 forwarded to 22 on the qemu vm so I can ssh into it. You can
| use whatever you want for virtual machines of course. Qemu seems
| nice these days but requires a bit of fiddling to get working.
| Virtualbox or vmware are probably easier. And this works just as
| well with cloud based virtual machines or any kind of remote
| host.
|
| Assuming you have docker and ssh running on your remote host:
| # point docker on your mac to your remote machine export
| DOCKER_HOST=ssh://dude@localhost:5555 # run nginx or
| whatever you want docker run -p 8080:80 nginx #
| forward the port locally ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 -p 5555
| jilles@localhost # open http://localhost:8080 in your
| browser
|
| There are all sorts of things you can do beyond this to make this
| more seamless but this is pretty sweet already.
| mfer wrote:
| Rancher Desktop is an open source container management and
| Kubernetes desktop app.
|
| https://rancherdesktop.io/
|
| Disclosure: I work on Rancher Desktop. Feedback welcome.
| dwaite wrote:
| I'm hitting https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-
| desktop/issues/56... but will look again in the future.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| You guys (by you guys I mean you and Docker, Inc) would do
| yourselves a _huge_ favor not spiting the Linux devs who
| invented the technologies you build your tools on.
|
| Where's the Linux version? Give it to me in Snap, AppImage,
| Flatpak, deb, or rpm, whatever you want. Just offer something.
| We'll take care of the rest.
| mfer wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. A Linux version is in the roadmap
| for this fall. I've had several discussions on it in the past
| week.
|
| Part of this was due to priorities and part of it was
| technicalities. For example, do we put it in a VM so that way
| someone can easily blow things away and we don't touch the
| base system? We had to come to some direction on what we
| wanted to do there. Now that we have that idea we need to
| finish up one thing on Mac that will translate over to Linux.
|
| The Linux side will be based on Lima[1] just as the Mac side
| is.
|
| Earlier today I had a discussion on the packaging format.
|
| [1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Thanks for the update! It's refreshing to see more turnkey
| GUI competitors in this space coming from larger corporate
| names.
| mikl wrote:
| The whole reason this (and Docker Desktop) are used is that
| Docker and K8s does not run natively on macOS and Windows.
|
| If you're using Linux already, most of this stuff is as
| useful as nipples on a breastplate. You could theoretically
| run an emptied out husk of the app on Linux, but there are
| much better tools for working with the tools directly.
|
| So I'd be greatly surprised if any Linux kernel hackers are
| miffed about this.
| mfer wrote:
| I'm not sure the whole reason for Docker Desktop is that
| Docker and K8s don't run natively. I mean, someone could
| create a Linux VM and get them running right through there.
| The tools exist to do this.
|
| There are even programs like minikube that can get you
| Kubernetes in a VM on Mac.
|
| There is something else to it that people want and that
| translates to Linux, I've learned. They want an easy button
| with an easy UX. There are a lot of people who are like
| that.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Right and when you're a corporation it cannot be
| overstated how important it is to coalesce around
| universal solutions that get up and out of the way with
| as few steps as possible. Handing new developers a
| handbook of incantations to get going is very fragile.
| Handing those same developers one executable with a big
| Go! button is much easier to get right.
|
| One example from my last job was having one shell.nix in
| the root of every project folder a developer could nix
| shell into that contained everything they needed, same
| version and all, to get going with that project.
| rietta wrote:
| When you are a <10 person small development agency where
| juniors come to work it is critical. The subject of
| https://rietta.com/blog/dockerized-cost-savings/. Paying
| over and over again for new devs to "get set up" was
| devastating the budget.
| 41209 wrote:
| It's open source, you could probably port it yourself.
|
| I somewhat agree with your viewpoint, but given Windows 10 is
| generally just Windows 10 , OSX is OSX... But Linux could be
| anything from Redhat to Alpine to a raspberry pi , I
| understand why devs wouldn't support it
| naikrovek wrote:
| I installed this and could not get networking going again in
| WSL 2 until I uninstalled it. I was sad.
| adolph wrote:
| Ok, I gave it a try. It's given me two K8s errors before any
| meaningful container work can be done. Not going to waste
| further time given a first run experience this bad. I'm
| interested in investing in my tools, not alpha-testing.
| athorax wrote:
| Probably shouldn't run tools in alpha status then
| [deleted]
| aranw wrote:
| Does this work with Docker compose files? For local development
| at the moment I mostly use docker-compose and for production
| using AWS Fargate so the kubernetes functionality is a bit
| wasted on me really
| thegagne wrote:
| Feedback:
|
| 1. There's very little "getting started" info here, you seem to
| assume everyone already runs kube everywhere else and already
| has workloads ready to go.
|
| 2. Not sure if this is feasible, but I'm looking for something
| that solves the Docker Desktop problem! I want something that
| can port map to a local port for testing, I want something that
| I can map a local folder to in order to store job input/output.
|
| 3. I tried starting it, and I'm already running Docker Desktop.
| It didn't seem to start a healthy kube cluster, and actually
| did nothing for me but just said it was waiting for the
| cluster. It might have been attempting to connect to old Docker
| kube clusters that I'm no longer running. Did I just need to
| wait longer? It wasn't clear.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Seems interesting, but the name conflict with
| https://rancher.com/ is _very_ confusing. Is Rancher Desktop
| associated with the linked company?
| mfer wrote:
| Rancher Desktop is being build by Rancher (which is now part
| of SUSE).
| kristjansson wrote:
| Thanks - that wasn't obvious from the Rancher Desktop site.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Interestingly, I think this may be a boon for kubernetes.
|
| We've been managing all our infrastructure with docker / compose,
| and its been great. But one of the key advantages is unifying the
| dev & prod environments. Now lately we've been outgrowing the
| docker solution so k8 is on the radar, but one of the things
| holding me back is losing the unified prod/dev experience.
|
| So the question has been, take the hit and suck up all the bugs,
| confusion, duplication etc. that come from having these separate,
| or move everyone over to k8 and have to deal with the complexity
| on the developer side?
|
| Well, this decision now definitely tips the scales - there's a
| distinct advantage to going all in on k8s because we can run it
| up and down the stack and not be constantly hassled by licensing
| and software restrictions.
| smarx007 wrote:
| I think HN needs to update their algorithm. If there is a large
| number of upvotes and flags, flags should count as votes from
| some point on. More people need to see this post and discussion
| needs to happen instead of pushing it off the front page in less
| than an hour.
| Macha wrote:
| I think since flags effect on ranking has becoming more known,
| there's more people using it as a post downvote, too.
| jameshart wrote:
| If this isn't front page headline news on HN then something NZ
| gone very wrong, agreed.
| [deleted]
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Of course it's already obvious how successful Docker is in terms
| of consumption, but it's even more clear in this thread how
| successful Docker is.
|
| Look at how many complaints there are, and people still use it.
| ben7799 wrote:
| We use Docker Desktop for the Mac at work. (Large company)
|
| Docker for Mac absolutely sucks. If they're going to force
| everyone to pay they better start fixing bugs.
|
| They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay,
| and then promptly shipped a point release with a showstopper bug.
|
| I literally asked IT for a Linux VM/Cloud machine yesterday for
| development because my Mac is dead in the water due to a bug.
| It's time efficient to develop on the Mac if it works, but the
| overall experience is terrible compared to Linux on the desktop
| IMO.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| In my experience, minikube (hyperkit) performs better than
| DockerForMac Kubernetes, if we ignore mounting of macOS folders
| to the VM.
| sixothree wrote:
| Docker for Windows isn't particularly stellar either. For
| instance, you have to actually log in to a machine to have a
| docker image running. Additionally only one user on a machine
| can run the host application at any given time.
|
| I have no idea how this is popular.
| naikrovek wrote:
| That isn't the case on Windows Server, and on Windows Desktop
| SKUs, having a logged in user is normal and expected.
| sixothree wrote:
| Actually I'm talking about windows server. Do you have any
| guides? Because when I try to open the docker GUI it kicks
| everyone out.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Our team uses it too, but we don't even use the UI - it's just
| to get the daemon started on startup. Is there a way to do this
| easily on the Mac without using Docker Desktop?
| dwaite wrote:
| you could check something like ubuntu multipass
| xtracto wrote:
| I got bitten by a Mac bug a couple of months ago: The latest
| version of Docker desktop didn't work for something (don't
| remember anymore) so I had to revert to a previous version and
| work in that for several months now.
| SilasX wrote:
| >They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you
| pay, and then promptly shipped a point release with a
| showstopper bug.
|
| Whoa, really? Is this written up somewhere?
|
| My first "WTF" with docker was in Fall 2015 when we dockerized
| our app and had it nicely set up so we could tell employees
| "run this command and the app Just Works" ... and then they
| introduced a breaking change to the format of docker compose
| files so it just mysteriously stopped working in the middle of
| the day.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| They might be referring to this?
| https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/183
| SilasX wrote:
| Thanks! Great HN discussion about it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547268
| nagyf wrote:
| > They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you
| pay
|
| I honestly thought that's a bug. That is so ridiculous if
| that's intentional. I agree with your post and have similar
| experiences with Docker for Mac
| stusmall wrote:
| After they introduced that feature I hit a bug where it would
| try to force an upgrade to version "null" and then crash. I
| ended up having to uninstall and reinstall it to get things
| usable again.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| I have to restart Docker for Mac multiple times a day. I'm
| surprised there hasn't been a community driven open source
| alternative yet
| drocer88 wrote:
| Singularity ( https://singularity.hpcng.org/user-
| docs/master/introduction.... ) is a platform that lets you
| create and run containers. Source is on github :
| https://github.com/hpcng/singularity
| hda111 wrote:
| podman-remote with a Linux VM?
| stusmall wrote:
| I recently switched jobs and made sure I wasn't going to get a
| mac again just because of Docker Desktop. At my last job, we
| had an application that did some very strange things with the
| Docker API. It regularly crash or lock up the VM or hit subtle
| correctness bugs in networking.
|
| I get the problem they are trying to solve is extremely
| difficult. I don't think I'd do much better trying to
| seamlessly ship a very Linux-centric API on Mac and Windows.
| They have my sympathy but that doesn't mean I'll use the
| product given a choice.
| stonecharioteer wrote:
| I'm the only person at my company who asked for a Linux
| machine. And I got it. Everyone else is on an M1. I said no.
| I don't want to use a Mac ever again. I had a Mac for 2 years
| at my previous company, one of those 2018 monstrousities.
| Never again.
|
| I asked for a P14 AMD Ryzen 7 5850H ThinkPad. Its still en
| route. But until then I'm using my Dell G5 SE Ryzen 7 4800H
| laptop with Manjaro. Best dev experience I've ever had at a
| company. The dev machine adds to the package IMO. If you're
| not getting the tools you want, you're not being paid enough
| ever.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Yeah, that's probably not gonna happen. At the scale Docker is
| operating at now, the reason the Mac app sucks, is because it's
| really hard. They already have the resources to throw at this
| problem now and this is the product we have.
|
| This is purely a $$$ move (which is fine) but we shouldn't
| expect an order of magnitude more work going into the product
| as a result of this move, imo.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| If you expect me to pay for it, it better work well enough to
| not be a blocker to my critical job path workflow.
| vesinisa wrote:
| But you're not actually paying for it. Your employer is.
| nicce wrote:
| They are still looking for their business model, because they
| have no money. They have been unprofitable for their whole
| existence.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The Docker experience is (and has been) subopar on MacOS. With
| the way Apple Silicon is headed, I don't really have much faith
| that the situation is going to get better, and I really wonder
| if the Mac client is even a priority for them at this point.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows.
| You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market like
| that.
| jandrese wrote:
| We de-dockerized our Windows deployments because it was
| causing no end of headaches for the end users.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows.
| You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market
| like that.
|
| The fact that they don't care, and yet you (or if not you,
| others) still use it, succinctly explains why they do not
| care.
|
| If they have a shitty, buggy client for Mac/Windows, and
| people complain about it but still use it, then they have no
| incentive to care.
| sixothree wrote:
| I use it only when some required tool is only available via
| docker. It is not a choice for us for any of our
| development.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Actually, I did like jandrese did, and got our solutions
| out of docker.
| VenTatsu wrote:
| It's hard to complain to much about a free product that is
| a side line to the companies main business... Oh wait, we
| just lost the free version and it's now the companies main
| monetization scheme? Well now I care a lot about the little
| annoying bugs I've been dealing with for the last 3 years.
| matsemann wrote:
| Wish they fixed the issue where it uses all available RAM
| even when running no containers yet.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| When running no containers? I've found that it's a problem
| when one is running (the solution to that is here[1]), but
| I've not experienced it when nothing is running.
|
| [1] https://blog.simonpeterdebbarma.com/2020-04-memory-and-
| wsl/
| dijit wrote:
| That's not an issue though. That's just how virtual
| machines work. You're carving out a chunk of your system
| for the docker Linux VM that runs your containers.
|
| You can open up the docker app and configure a smaller
| amount of ram if it impacts your host OS
| sixothree wrote:
| That's not how virtual machines work on Windows. Even
| Linux virtual machines use dynamic memory. You assign a
| minimum, maximum, and a startup value. When the machine
| needs more RAM, Windows give it to it. When it releases
| it, it's available for other purposes.
| matsemann wrote:
| No, that's not how it works with WSL2 as the backend. You
| then cannot configure a smaller amount of RAM in the
| docker app, it's greyed out. One can limit the RAM that
| WSL has, but that's not really helpful when docker steals
| all of it. (And WSL2 supports dynamic allocation of
| memory anyways, so it's supposed to return unused memory
| to the host)
|
| So you are wrong. For those of us affected by the bug,
| it's a _big_ issue.
| onlywicked wrote:
| You can configure the max memory in wsl 2 with .wslconfig
| file.
| matsemann wrote:
| yes, but docker will eat whatever I give to it, leaving
| nothing for the actual containers or other stuff in wsl
| naikrovek wrote:
| Linux considers unused RAM to be wasted RAM. WSL 2
| addresses this with a Linux kernel change that right now
| is insiders only. I expect it to land with Windows 11.
| nickjj wrote:
| I've found it to be really good on Windows 10 Pro, even with
| 6 year old hardware.
|
| I've been using it full time since 2018 and it's been nothing
| but really fast and as stable as you can ask for given how
| complex of a tool it is. It rarely crashes (maybe once every
| few months) and I've built thousands of images across many
| different tech stacks.
| dboreham wrote:
| Countdown started until Microsoft adds their own docker to
| Windows.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Docker Desktop with developer environments would be a great value
| add if it supported Windows, macOS _and_ Linux. As it is, we have
| developers in the company using Linux workstations so our Docker
| subscription is just for a registry.
|
| We'll be moving soon given no forthcoming Linux client.
| justincormack wrote:
| Hi, we have requests for Docker Desktop Linux, please upvote
| https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/39 and we are looking
| at the details of what we need to do to implement this.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Thanks for listening, Justin. Looking forward to updates. I
| know it must be tough facing a lot of adversity from the
| community. I hope you guys continue playing to your
| strengths, improve customer support (number 1 in my book) and
| continue beefing out your product portfolio so companies like
| the one I work for can build healthy relationships with
| Docker, Inc.
| frant-hartm wrote:
| If you are on Linux and using only the open-source bits (that's
| what I do) and have subscription for the registry, why would
| you be moving anywhere? What does this change bring that I am
| missing? As I understand it the change only affects Docker
| Desktop, which is for MacOS and Windows.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| It's not this change in particular, it's that you can get
| paid image registries with better customer support at a lower
| price point and higher availability. Docker needs to value
| add to their bare registry product otherwise they will be
| outcompeted by larger companies that can offer registries as
| part of a larger product suite.
|
| Unfortunately, Docker's most valuable addition, developer
| environments, is only for two of the three OSes used most
| commonly by developers in a corporate environment. No company
| is going to adopt a feature that can only be used by two-
| thirds of its workforce.
| Macha wrote:
| I wonder how many people just use docker desktop as a nicely
| packaged installer/VM manager? I know I don't use any of the
| other included tools, so can't see why I'd use docker desktop
| on Linux myself over just install docker from my package
| manager (or podman in my case)
| [deleted]
| habosa wrote:
| Tech companies should not be able to offer something for free and
| then later charge for it. It should be illegal and prosecuted as
| anticompetitive behavior. It's not at all fair to potential
| competition, who can't beat free and therefore don't enter the
| marketplace. It's just a way to try and capture a whole market
| unfairly. Then when the price goes up you can end up with
| regretful consumers who may have chosen another option if not for
| the misleading pricing.
|
| If they want to do this, it should have to say in big bold font
| "this is free for now and we will charge for it later, you will
| have X months of warning before being required to pay at that
| time".
|
| In some non-software industries this is already considered
| illegal behavior:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
|
| I'd personally even go so far as to say that there should be some
| legislation around using very cheap loss-inducing prices for
| extended periods of time to capture the market and then jacking
| them back up. Like how Ubers used to cost ~30% of what they do
| now in San Francisco. But that's a lot harder to specify as there
| are legitimate use cases for sales and loss leaders.
| moogly wrote:
| How do you even install Docker Engine on Windows without WSL2?
| Same goes for macOS.
| treesknees wrote:
| If you're referring to Docker Desktop on Windows, you can use
| the Hyper-V backend instead of WSL2. MacOS uses HyperKit API to
| spin up a Linux VM to run it. There is no native engine for
| Windows or MacOS.
|
| https://docs.docker.com/desktop/windows/install/
| moogly wrote:
| Sure, but I've never seen a non-Docker Desktop installer for
| any of the tools like the CLI, Compose etc., and I can't seem
| to find one now either.
| naikrovek wrote:
| https://download.docker.com/win/static/stable/x86_64/
|
| Not an installer, and doesn't include docker-compose, but
| this is what you're talking about, I think.
|
| Only supports Windows containers.
| physicsguy wrote:
| so, when's everyone switching over to Podman?
| bionade24 wrote:
| When it's actually 100%ly compliant in it's APIs, especially
| regarding podman-compose and the socket API.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Podman doesn't do what docker desktop does. They are not the
| same thing at all.
| raesene9 wrote:
| If you want an open source alternative, just use Docker Engine,
| it's still open source.
|
| You can install the docker client inside WSL/OSX and connect
| over SSH to a docker CE instance.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If you're doing $10M in ARR, how much engineering time are you
| going to spend to switch compared to paying Docker a few
| thousand dollars a month? Your spend on cloud and Slack (or
| other comms) is likely far higher. You're probably spending
| more on mobile/cell business service.
|
| "Docker attempting to monetize users of its product who can
| easily afford the cost." I mean, the terms seems reasonable,
| and wouldn't you rather support Docker vs IBM (Redhat->Podman)?
|
| Nothing changes for users who aren't making money using Docker,
| but I suppose you could still spend your time switching to
| podman on principal.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| I'm part of a large company and I have no influence over what
| most other people do. My projects within the company are
| small so whenever these sorts of things happen, it rarely
| translates into the company spending a bunch of money to
| provide the product across the company. At best, I may be
| able to convince a manager to buy it for 2-10 people on my
| team.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Licensing isn't perfect. On the contrary, it is the least
| worst implementation of attempting to extract a reasonable
| amount of revenue from the user of your software, who is
| realizing value creation or benefit themselves from its
| use. SaaS is popular because the exchange of value between
| producer and consumer (and the ownership and responsibility
| model) is much more clear (imho). Open source tooling might
| be a better fit based on your org's needs and your use
| case.
|
| Solving for the intersection of building and maintaining
| tools people desire and those building said tools eating
| and paying rent is hard.
|
| (no affiliation with docker)
| physicsguy wrote:
| My tiny part of a _division_ of my last company made $40
| million USD per year in revenue. We had ~40 employees.
| Getting the funding for using something like this came from a
| few levels up and would be in no way guaranteed.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I admit Docker will likely have to tweak their licensing
| model while also building relationships where there is some
| wiggle room for how licensing is handled (perhaps accept
| credit card payments from corporate users that they can
| expense to sidestep procurement). "Call Us For Pricing"
| adolph wrote:
| At my institution the "adapt open source" vs "buy"
| balance is also affected by the high effort of making a
| purchase happen. My bet is that things will get hung up
| on an exclusive acquisition justification, at which point
| the IBM/RHEL sales team will come in with "solution"
| using podman, buildah, etc. I've quit DD just now to try
| those tools out.
| justincormack wrote:
| We do accept credit card payments. All our pricing is on
| the website https://docker.com/pricing - the Business
| plan will be available by credit card soon as well.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This seems like a false economy. Docker adds insane value
| for us (similar number of tech employees), and while I
| don't like price hikes based on things other than value add
| features, I certainly want Docker to exist in five years.
| Or get bought by Hashicorp, perhaps.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| I'll preface this by saying I'm an IBM employee. That being
| said your comment rubbed me the wrong way...
|
| > wouldn't you rather support Docker vs IBM (Redhat->Podman)?
|
| Podman is an open source product and Docker is not. I'd much
| rather support an open source project. And what's wrong with
| "supporting" IBM anyways? Did they hurt you in some way???
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Docker Desktop is not open source, but the Docker container
| engine is. Also, runc, which is the actual container
| runtime, is not only open source, but was created by docker
| but is also what gets used by podman. podman is very nearly
| just a fork with the daemon and socket removed, which would
| not have been possible if docker hadn't been open source.
| syshum wrote:
| Docker is not really a product, Docker is a company with in
| that there are several products, some are open source some
| are not.
|
| The Docker Engine is Apache License and open source.
| chucksta wrote:
| Many people in many ways
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > And what's wrong with "supporting" IBM anyways? Did they
| hurt you in some way???
|
| They are a dysfunctional consultancy masquerading as a
| technology firm, running on inertia. They are not to be
| supported. (Also, my genuine condolences)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24228972
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532125
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22224782
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706128
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24471903
| stuff4ben wrote:
| FWIW, we've divested/spun off the "consultancy" part. And
| not every part of IBM is bad, there are a ton of great
| developers and teams that work here, no condolences
| needed. I quite enjoy doing what I do here. Lots of
| innovation in multiple areas, but I guess if you have to
| drink the startup koolaid prevalent here on HN, be my
| guest.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I'm not at a startup nor drink the koolaid [1]. I am a
| consultant, so I get to see how the sausage is made
| across a wide variety of orgs. In my long tenure in tech
| (20+ years), I have arrived at evangelizing and
| encouraging engineering first and data driven
| organizations; in my experience, that provides the best
| environment for technologists to have autonomy, while
| pursuing mastery and purpose (which, hopefully, enables
| some amount of fulfillment alongside financial
| compensation). IBM is not such an org, hence my
| comment(s), but there are startups, enterprises, and a
| fat middle of SMB businesses that truly are innovative
| and can demonstrate results to back up that description
| of themselves.
|
| TLDR I want the best experience for my fellow
| technologists and engineers.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28181703
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Looks like you've had problems with IBM consultants, I'll
| grant you that, but I don't dabble in that side of the
| business. In my 20+ years of professional experience I
| have seen it all when it comes to software development
| and IT service management. From small startup shops
| barely knowing how to manage Java dependencies, to
| ecommerce shops doing millions of dollars a day in sales,
| to large enterprises being among the first adopters of
| Kubernetes. To lump all of one company into a single
| disparaging statement is disingenuous.
|
| TLDR; your comment is stupid.
| n42 wrote:
| as soon as a viable alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac
| exists I am done with this company forever (and they seem to be
| anticipating that)
| handrous wrote:
| I've used Docker for years and never touched Desktop. What's
| indispensable about it?
| saxonww wrote:
| It's not great, at all. But at least on Mac it's a lot
| easier to get going with Docker for Mac than it is to roll
| your own with e.g. VirtualBox. I assume it's the same on
| Windows.
| handrous wrote:
| I just use whatever `brew install docker` gives me. They
| don't call _that_ Docker Desktop, right? I thought that
| was some kind of GUI thing of theirs--I do all my
| dockering from the command line, which looks the same
| across Mac and Linux except when (rarely, these days) the
| virtualization the Mac implementation uses leaks through.
| saxonww wrote:
| The key is the virtualization. I think (!) with `brew
| install docker` you've got to set up a VM and get Docker
| running inside it, yourself. Docker Desktop for Mac does
| that, and implements filesystem and networking
| integration for you.
|
| Most people like the convenience of that, if not the
| performance or (now) the cost.
| handrous wrote:
| Closest I've come to having to manually set up anything
| with a simple `brew install docker` making sure my shell
| sets the env vars correctly. It automatically sets up the
| VM, and has since I started using it years ago.
|
| (but, it's possible that what I'm using is _also_
| considered Docker Desktop--I just associated that term
| with their GUI thingy [and I think it includes some kind
| of sys tray widget?], which I 've never used)
|
| [EDIT] oh no you're kinda right, I think I recall having
| to run one command, post-install, on older versions, to
| set up the VM, though I don't think you still have to
| _and_ that was all still handled for you, you just had to
| _tell it_ to do it. `docker-machine create default` or
| something like that, was enough for 99% of use cases. Don
| 't have to even do that, now, though, IIRC.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Honest question: what features of DfM are you using and what
| alternatives have you tried that don't work for you?
| justinholmes wrote:
| Just use multipass https://multipass.run and folder mount.
| rcarmo wrote:
| This. This is what I do (except I use VS Code to remote to
| the Multipass VM)
| stuff4ben wrote:
| why do you need the Docker Desktop? Can't you just use the
| command line? I mostly use Docker on Linux and even then I've
| almost switched everything over to Podman.
| ianburrell wrote:
| The Docker CLI can't do anything without the Docker daemon.
| Daemon (and containers) only runs on Linux. On Mac, it
| needs to run inside a Linux VM.
|
| Before Docker Desktop, would need to create VM with Docker
| and connect to that. Docker Desktop makes that smooth and
| wraps in nice UI.
| detaro wrote:
| Curious to see what that means for Windows containers. Microsoft
| is heavily recommending Docker there, but asking people to
| license another thing from a third party just to be able to use a
| feature on their expensive Windows licenses seems somewhat on the
| nose for them to push.
| jrsj wrote:
| Maybe this is just a play to get Microsoft to acquire Docker
| lol
| jordemort wrote:
| Well, that's one way to drive Podman adoption.
| mleonhard wrote:
| > There's a standards conversion going on where we can trace the
| provenance of each and every layer of the image, we can start
| signing those layers, and with that metadata, we can start doing
| automated decisioning, automated reporting, automated visibility
| into what's been done to that image at each step of the
| lifecycle.
|
| Docker's CEO is being disingenuous. When you deploy a Docker
| container, you specify the image ID. The ID looks like a SHA-256
| digest and even starts with the string 'sha256' but it is an
| arbitrary value generated by the docker daemon on the local
| machine. The ID is not a hash of the image contents [0, 1]. In
| other words, docker images are not content-addressed.
|
| Since docker images are not content-addressed, your image
| registry and image transfer tools can subvert the security of
| your production systems. The fix is straightforward: make an
| image ID be the SHA-256 digest of the image contents, which is
| the same everywhere: on your build system, image registry, test
| system, and production hosts. This fix will increase supply chain
| security for all Docker users. It is massive low-hanging fruit.
|
| Now Docker will add image signatures without first making images
| content-addressed. Their decision makes sense only if their goal
| is to make money and not make a secure product. I cannot trust a
| company with such priorities.
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/39247#issuecomment-49697...
|
| [1] https://github.com/distribution/distribution/issues/1662
|
| EDIT: Added another link.
| voxic11 wrote:
| You seem to be mixing up image ids which are not content
| addressable identifiers and image digests which are.
| bspammer wrote:
| The fact that images are not content-addressed is very
| surprising to me. I just always assumed they were because...
| why wouldn't they be? I bet a large proportion of other devs
| assumed the same.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| That's because the parent comment is completely wrong.
|
| Images have a reference (e.g. "ubuntu:20.04"), they have an
| ID inside docker (random string), and they have a digest.
|
| All image data is stored by digest. Even when you fetch an
| image reference it is looking up the digest of that reference
| and fetching that digest and that digest is verified.
|
| An image manifest contains the digests of the image config
| and the digest of all the layers, the image config also
| stores the digest of all the layers. This is how all the data
| is traversed from the registry.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| I will add, once the image is on disk indeed the integrity
| is not verified so it can be modified after pull either
| maliciously or by accident.
|
| Once pulled, the content addressed layers are extracted
| into the storage driver (overlay, btrfs, whatever).
| voxic11 wrote:
| They are if you use the digest rather than the id.
| mleonhard wrote:
| You can specify the digest of a base image when building a
| new image. You cannot specify the digest of a built image
| when starting a container.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| A built (as in `docker build && docker run`) image does
| not have a digest because the digests are for the
| tar+gzipped versions of the layers (+ the image config
| and manifest).
|
| The layers are not tar+gzipped until you attempt to push
| them, at which point the digest is calculated.
| hda111 wrote:
| Podman project recently introduced a lot of content
| addressing features. Some are still experimental though.
| isatty wrote:
| I think that the functionality provided by Docker needs to be a
| first class citizen in Linux, cli and user interface including
| and not just the backend. I don't like having my workflows tied
| to a private companies whims. Podman is a viable alternative, and
| while its tied to redhat, it's still better than Docker imho.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| Systemd has something called "systemd-nspawn" back when Docker
| was at its peak.
|
| Not sure if its still around.
| gjs278 wrote:
| lol absolutely not. if you think it's going to get first class
| UI support before qemu does you are delusional. docker may not
| even be the top dog in 5 years, it could easily lose to
| kubernetes or even plain VMs / jails.
| glutamate wrote:
| If Docker wants to grow up, maybe they could start with replying
| to support tickets from paying customers. I have a 10 day old
| open ticket with no reply.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| This has also been our experience with the company.
| nja wrote:
| Hah, tell me about it. We were unable to give them more money
| (buy more seats), and our urgent support request was open for a
| week. Turns out (from a moment's console snooping) it was a
| straightforward REST call that was missing a body parameter, so
| a simple 'curl' fixed the issue for us. But I wonder... how
| long they were actively hurting their business? And how did a
| serious bug like that get into production? What does that say
| about their systems?
| justincormack wrote:
| Hey sorry about that, can you send me the ticket details justin
| @ docker.com and I can look into it.
| mikestew wrote:
| So, like many companies, successful support consists of
| yelping at the appropriate public forum, be it Twitter or in
| this case, HN. Anything the public doesn't see: "due to
| unexpected call volume, you'll wait at least ten days before
| hearing from anyone". All the while the company forgets that
| the complaining customer isn't the only one reading. The rest
| of us are reading a live account of what company's customer
| support looks like.
| p2t2p wrote:
| Not really comparable to the problem with Google you're
| pointing to. Google's services are free, here we have
| tickets from paying customers.
|
| I've never opened a ticket to Google as paying customer so
| I don't know for sure but unless someone comes and confirms
| that same crap is happening even if you pay we can't really
| compare those two cases and Docker is worse for simple
| reason that it demands payment yet ignores paying
| customers.
| adolph wrote:
| _Policy success is directly dependent on how we handle
| requests for exception. Granting exceptions undermines
| people's sense of fairness, and sets a precedent precedent
| that undermines future policy. In environments where
| exceptions become normalized, leaders often find that issuing
| writs of exception--for policies they themselves have
| designed--starts to swallow up much of their time.
| Organizations spending significant time on exceptions are
| experiencing exception debt. The escape is to stop working
| the exceptions, and instead work the policy._
|
| Larson, Will. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering
| Management (p. 122). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.
| myko wrote:
| Thanks for posting, ordered a copy just now
| adolph wrote:
| Another point of genius is right after the above section
| on exception debt.
|
| _It was in that era of my career that I came to view
| management as, at its core, a moral profession. We have
| the opportunity to create an environment for those around
| us to be their best, in fair surroundings. For me, that's
| both an opportunity and an obligation for managers, and
| saying no in that room with my manager and CTO was, in
| part, my decision to hold the line on what's right._
|
| Larson, Will. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering
| Management (p. 123). Stripe Press. Kindle Edition.
| [deleted]
| resizeitplz wrote:
| Fwiw, while there probably isn't a _good_ public relations
| response here ... N=1, when I see a company publicly managing
| escalation via public shaming, it inclines me to steer
| purchasing decisions away from them in the future.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| My thought as well.
|
| If I have to tweet-storm to get someone to look at my
| support ticket, there is no real support.
| mongol wrote:
| It should not have to work like this.
| indemnity wrote:
| Agree 100%. I don't want to have to resort to Twitter or HN
| to get a ticket worked. Fuck that, hire some staff, work on
| your enterprise support.
| temp_praneshp wrote:
| > hire some staff
|
| And that's why they are scaling back on free plans.
| glutamate wrote:
| I have a better idea. How about you look at EVERY open
| ticket, starting with those from paying customers?
|
| EDIT: Wow, they actually did this and got back to me - thank
| you!
| asddubs wrote:
| if they're smart they just looked at all the 10 day old
| tickets
| ghostpepper wrote:
| maybe 10 +/-1 for time zones
| raman162 wrote:
| It's shameful that this product was once free is now going to be
| charged, even if it's only for larger businesses.
|
| I wonder how sustainable it is for docker to be like other open
| source entities and rely on consistent donations from major
| corporations to rely on income.
|
| I also wonder if this will impede on docker adoption in the
| coming months. I guess time is the only one that can tell
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Shameful? What's shameful about it? Software entitlement is
| outrageous. It's the only field where people expect
| professionals to keep doling out labor for free and then
| complain about the free stuff.
|
| If it isn't already abundantly clear to you: free software
| isn't sustainable. It's built on the backs of people who
| provide it for whatever reason they choose.
|
| This be a beggar so I can continue to have free stuff mentality
| has got to go.
| raman162 wrote:
| Shameful may have been a harsh word , disappointing is more
| appropriate.
|
| The disappointing part is that a product that was once free
| and distributed in abundance is now requiring licensing
| starting immediately for small businesses. There is a
| transition gap but the policy is effective starting today.
| There were no added features of value, it was just a random
| change of price from nothing to something.
|
| I think the new enterprise features that they are boasting
| about which is probably where they would end up making most
| of their money could have been suffice as this new policy is
| going to be difficult for them to enforce.
|
| I'm sure docker desktop originally being free contributed to
| them being this popular. It made using containers for
| development super easy on windows and Mac.
|
| Now that they have the huge user base, they're in a good
| position to dictate terms in their favour whether we like it
| or not.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The only thing you're saying here is that you don't
| recognize its value and you don't want to pay for it. No,
| wait, you don't want _businesses_ --fully capable
| organizations who can pay--to pay for it.
|
| You should be ashamed.
|
| There's nothing random about it. A tech business is finally
| realizing giving products away for free isn't a business.
| What a surprise.
|
| > Now that they have the huge user base, they're in a good
| position to dictate terms in their favour whether we like
| it or not.
|
| No one is forcing you to use docker. Grow up.
|
| Better yet, you try building a product, giving it away to
| choosing beggar developers, and figure out how to run a
| business where you pay six-figure engineering salaries to
| qualified employees off the cash flow of "donations." What
| a joke.
| dang wrote:
| If you continue to break the site guidelines like this,
| we will ban you. We've warned you multiple times before,
| and this is seriously not cool--regardless of how right
| you are or feel you are.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| raman162 wrote:
| > The only thing you're saying here is that you don't
| recognize its value and you don't want to pay for it. No,
| wait, you don't want businesses--fully capable
| organizations who can pay--to pay for it.
|
| No, I communicated my point clearly that I find it
| _disappointing_ for the shift.
|
| I understand that a business needs to be viable but I'm
| commenting on the fact that they probably wouldn't have
| the mass adoption that they have now if Docker Desktop
| had the licensing structure today that it had from the
| beginning.
|
| The whole internet basically runs on Linux which is
| largely supported by monetary donations and companies
| making source code contributions so let's not forget that
| alternative altogether.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| Surprised no one like Microsoft has stepped in to buy Docker out-
| right.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| What a strange sentence.. As if "Docker" is some third party.
| They're referring to themselves in the 3rd person.
|
| Be warned
| hbn wrote:
| Meh, it's just for the headline. If someone shared the article
| and the title is scraped, "we're" isn't as self-explanatory and
| required you to look at the URL for context.
|
| The article itself uses "we"
| sekathlon wrote:
| they just have to delete the word "our" in the headline and
| all would be fine. this is just weird.
| Proven wrote:
| It's not.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| "Docker is Updating and Extending Our Product Subscriptions"
|
| It's plain wrong. You can't refer to yourself as Docker AND
| as "we"
| seanhunter wrote:
| I don't really see Docker having that much of an alternative -
| they have to figure out some way to make money and none of their
| other attempts have worked.
|
| That being said, since the core docker tech is free, this will
| surely just cause some free alternative to DD to spring up in the
| relatively short term, and accelerate the move away from Docker
| in general, which has been happening for a while.
| erikkri wrote:
| This seems like a relevant link:
| https://medium.com/crowdbotics/a-complete-one-by-one-guide-t...
| berdon wrote:
| This is likely the most realistic path forward for most
| developers using MBPs.
| jcoder wrote:
| Unfortunately, it looks like work is also underway to deprecate
| and remove `docker-machine`:
| https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/245
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Docker have never done the one obvious thing to monetise - an
| upsell and enterprise support for the engine.
|
| Trying to be a poor mans pivotal was a stupid strategy, and
| developer tools is awkward too.
|
| I'm convinced if they charged $10 per engine per month they would
| have kept all of the goodwill and momentum and been the next
| VMWare.
| gjs278 wrote:
| vmware is the next cobol. nobody under 50 is going to use that
| shit.
| sneak wrote:
| The engine on Windows is nonfree (both cost and freedom).
| V99 wrote:
| They tried that ("Docker Enterprise Edition") years ago, with
| some minor differentiation on features only available in EE...
| but for $62-300/node/month. This is now the part Mirantis owns,
| current Docker is the developer-focused side.
|
| https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-enterprise-edition/
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20171118161452/https://www.docke...
| dedoussis wrote:
| What stops any developer of a large org using Docker Desktop
| through their personal license/account? How is such a restriction
| going to be imposed?
| dharmab wrote:
| Note that Docker Desktop and Docker Engine are separate products.
| Docker Desktop is the desktop application package that makes
| Docker user-friendly on macOS and Windows. Docker Engine, the
| container runtime itself, remains free:
|
| > No changes to Docker Engine or any upstream open source Docker
| or Moby project.
|
| If you develop on Linux, no changes are needed.
| alanwreath wrote:
| Not a trivial thing to run Docker natively inside of a WSL2
| environment - at least my attempts to install straight docker
| strictly inside Ubuntu running in WSL2 always resulted in
| Ubuntu's attempts to reach some .exe with regard to Docker. I
| did learn some fun facts WRT Linux in WSL2 - it doesn't have
| systemd installed by default.
| spooneybarger wrote:
| I've never had a problem with it. I've been using docker
| engine in WSL2 for a couple years.
|
| I install `docker.io` via apt and its good to go except that
| package has on some ubuntu versions been missing the
| /etc/init.d/ startup script.
|
| I build my WSL2 environments via Dockerfile. You can see
| everything here:
|
| https://github.com/SeanTAllen/wsl-
| environments/tree/main/ubu...
|
| Using that dockerfile I can then export the file system as a
| tar (https://wiki.seantallen.com/notes/docker-export-
| filesystem/) and import into wsl using the wsl import
| command.
| naikrovek wrote:
| well the installation process seems to have changed in the
| last 2 years. installing `docker.io` is _not_ enough to get
| docker running in WSL 2 anymore.
| arsfeld wrote:
| How would that work if you're using WSL? Docker for Desktop
| uses WSL but creates it's own separate VM (if you can call it a
| VM).
|
| Would I be able to install and run Docker inside Ubuntu's WSL
| distro to avoid paying for Docker for Desktop?
| easton wrote:
| Yes, but you'd have to connect the Docker CLI running in
| Windows to the engine inside Ubuntu (not hard), and then you
| wouldn't be able to mount stuff in Windows into Docker
| containers via relative paths (you'd have to start them with
| /mnt/c/...). If neither of those things matter for you (like
| if all of your project code is inside your WSL VM), then it's
| totally fine.
| JoyrexJ9 wrote:
| I do all my work under WSL, and run Docker engine in WSL and
| it works perfectly. 100% headless.
|
| I may have had to expose the Docker socket for VS Code
| containers support to work, but that wasn't any pain, and
| secured with TLS.
|
| Never needed Docker Desktop, which seemed like a bloated
| mess.
| dharmab wrote:
| You could configure Docker Engine in Ubuntu to expose a
| network socket, and configure Docker CLI in Windows WSL to
| use that network socket:
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Docker#Daemon_socket
| maple3142 wrote:
| Enable WSL2, then you can just install the docker provided by
| your distro package manager. For example, I am using docker
| packaed by Arch Linux, and it works as expected.
|
| If you need to use `docker` command under Powershell, maybe
| exposing docker socket to Windows host would probably work. I
| didn't try it as I don't need it.
| raesene9 wrote:
| You can connect to a remote Docker engine instance over SSH,
| which is easier to setup than exposing the Docker socket over
| a TCP port.
|
| So install the client inside WSL and the engine on a Linux
| VM.
|
| EDIT:
| https://raesene.github.io/blog/2018/11/11/Docker-18-09-SSH/
| was a blog I wrote when that feature landed, AFAIK it works
| the same way now :)
| Macha wrote:
| Or just use it inside WSL2, which already is a Linux VM?
| raesene9 wrote:
| I've never actually tried installing Docker engine in
| WSL2... might work I guess :)
| mishafb wrote:
| You probably can, there's nothing about containers that
| shouldn't work on WSL2
| peytoncasper wrote:
| There reality of this is that Docker is setting themselves up as
| an enterprise software business. Like the one they spun out a
| short while ago.
|
| You as a developer won't be involved with purchasing Docker
| subscriptions. Instead they'll have sales teams that approach
| your IT department who will pay for support reasons and pre
| install Docker Desktop on all company hardware.
|
| That's why this is only focused at larger companies. This gives
| IT departments someone to call when a developer reports a
| problem.
| krzyk wrote:
| I'm a bit puzzled what costs and what not, as it is a first time
| I see "Docker Desktop" name.
|
| I use docker on linux, mainly executing "docker build", "docker
| run", etc.
|
| Does it still cost if I do it in a 1k+ company during work?
| treesknees wrote:
| Docker Desktop is the only way to run Docker "natively" on
| Windows and MacOS (I say "natively" because it's really using a
| linux VM behind the scenes.)
|
| So if you're on Linux, nothing has changed (yet).
| vlunkr wrote:
| The article says there are no changes to the command line tool.
| This is the first time I'm hearing of Docker Desktop as well.
| db3pt0 wrote:
| Looking at the installation instructions for Docker on
| Mac/Windows, what is the expected way to install the Docker
| Engine without installing the Desktop bundle?
|
| From https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/binaries/#install-
| cli...
|
| > The macOS binary includes the Docker client only. It does not
| include the dockerd daemon.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Docker Engine only runs on Linux.
|
| Docker for Mac/Windows sets up a Linux VM using macOS/Windows
| native virtualization via the open-source HyperKit/VPNKit
| abstractions maintained by Docker-the-Company and the
| community. That VM runs Docker Enginer (dockerd) and all
| interaction (docker CLI commands, shared volumes, networking,
| etc.) are proxied into that VM.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| So unless I'm missing something important, why not just use
| docker engine directly on a wsl2 instance?
| kristjansson wrote:
| I'm not a Windows user but AIUI just running dockerd in
| WSL2 misses some of the volume sharing and networking
| niceties. Nothing that couldn't be replicated though
| mongol wrote:
| Is that working? Does wsl2 provide more than a shell?
| singingboyo wrote:
| Last I recall, docker desktop on windows explicitly
| recommended WSL2 over Hyper-V or whatever based setups.
| dharmab wrote:
| WSL2 uses a full Linux VM running under HyperV.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| WSL2 can get weird when you start trying to install
| software with low level virtualization and file system
| features. YMMV. I'd use it to install apps, but I
| wouldn't be confident it'd work with Docker. Even if it
| did initially work, eventually you'll hit a problem for
| which there is no googleable answer & good luck with
| that.
| amaranth wrote:
| Docker Desktop installs dockerd in a WSL2 instance these
| days instead of using VirtualBox so I'd assume it works
| pretty well now.
| w7 wrote:
| Current Docker on Windows detects if you have WSL2 or
| not, and gives you the option of just installing docker
| in WSL2 + configuring the Windows docker tools to
| manipulate the docker daemon running in WSL2.
| mongol wrote:
| But what does it run as PID1? I think not systemd?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Yeah, that's the biggest issue; right now Docker Desktop is the
| only supported way of installing Docker on Windows:
| https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/#supported-platforms
| That's literally the only reason I use it.
|
| There's probably a fairly simple way to run Docker directly in
| WSL, but a lot of documentation is going to need to be updated
| to point to that method.
| ericpp wrote:
| A better strategy to me would've been to keep it free and tightly
| integrate it with Docker Hub to push people towards Docker Hub
| services. This software is already installed on most Windows
| computers that need to use Docker and provides a perfect
| opportunity to promote Docker Hub and any of their other
| services.
| nickjj wrote:
| For everyone who is against this change, can you please write up
| why?
|
| For a ton of small companies (anyone making $10 million or less
| per year) nothing is going to change and DD is still free to use.
|
| If you're at a big organization with let's say 200 developers
| chances are your company makes hundreds of millions of dollars a
| year. Even Docker's most expensive business plan would cost you
| 200 * $21 = $4,200 month.
|
| Payroll for your 200 developers will likely be over 3 million
| dollars a month. How can you be upset with paying 4k a month?
| That's almost nothing relative to other expenses.
|
| Realistically I'm surprised Docker is charging so little for
| their business plan. Making 4k on 200 developers at a 300
| million+ company is not asking a lot.
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| I don't get enough out of docker desktop for mac to be worth
| the 21 dollars a month, personally. It manages a VM and the
| port mappings/exposure of docker sockets on my behalf. That is
| something that can be replaced fairly easily and not cost me
| 5-20 dollars a month.
|
| This on top of some of the decisions in the past year like
| removing the ability to opt out of updates, and the issues that
| pop up when I don't expect it (crashes, file systems, etc) I am
| more inclined to find other solutions.
| dwaite wrote:
| Because we use containers to share images outside our
| organization. This reduces the accessibility and thus the value
| of the entire Docker ecosystem.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| you jumped from $10m revenue to a 200 developer company with
| payroll of $3m month in your example.
|
| There are tiny companies with $10m revenue (remember, revenue
| isn't margin and certainly isn't profit). A company could
| easily have non-employment expenses be 90% of its revenue, so
| we are talking about $1m or 7-8 person company there on decent
| salaries. A far cry from the 200 devs you give as an example.
|
| However as to "why" - because docker's precise value
| proposition is its ubiquity and universality. The exact reason
| people have adopted it is because everyone can run it, no
| matter who, no matter where. So this compromises the _main_
| value proposition of Docker. People will now find alternatives
| because if I can 't distribute my application using docker and
| know the person at the other end can run it (because now they
| need a license that they don't have) then it lost virtually its
| whole point to me.
| nickjj wrote:
| > A company could easily have non-employment expenses be 90%
| of its revenue, so we are talking about $1m or 7-8 person
| company there on decent salaries
|
| Can you give a few real world examples where a $10 million /
| year revenue company with 7 employees would have difficulty
| paying $147 a month (or $49 if they went for the $7 / month
| instead)? With the $7 / month plan (if you only care about
| DD), the entire annual cost for all 7 devs is less than
| hiring 1 developer for 1 day at a normal US dev salary.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Ok, so you're asking about a different point, now, the
| difficulty of paying. In that case the difficulties arise
| because of corporate gatekeepers, licensing stewards and
| general policies governing software licensing. Typically my
| organisation would not approve this sort of purchase
| without a business case and justification - not least
| because we are a not-for-profit and any money not going to
| our cause is scrutinised heavily (the thing donors
| absolutely hate the most is the idea their money doesn't
| get to the cause they donated to and instead goes into
| sinkhole of funding commerical company's bottom lines).
|
| Obviously one payment is not too big but as soon as the
| policy allows one it allows all such things so its
| effectively opening the gate to all kinds of micro-payments
| that quickly build up and become entrenched as "essential".
|
| Here's a similar analogy ... does your company pay for your
| parking? Why not, its small compared to your salary right?
| and it definitely helps you get to work, be more efficient
| etc? Well its not just about the parking its because that
| represents a _class of purchase_ that if allowed would tilt
| the scale towards a massive number of similar types of
| expenses. So in fact most places will have blanked policies
| disallowing small purchases.
|
| Another question: since the price for Docker Desktop
| already got arbitrarily changed with no notice, why would
| you believe that it won't go up in the future? Or get more
| restrictive in other ways? Once a company executes bad
| faith one time, continued manifestations of that have to be
| considered as a risk.
| nickjj wrote:
| With Docker, even if 1 dev spent 2 days coming up with a
| perfect solution that would allow all 7 devs to move away
| from DD without wasting 1 second of productivity you're
| still losing out vs sticking with DD at their new annual
| rates. To me that's a very strong business case.
|
| > Another question: since the price for Docker Desktop
| already got arbitrarily changed with no notice, why would
| you believe that it won't go up in the future?
|
| Personally, I'll worry about a future notice when it
| happens. A meteor could wipe out all of humanity tomorrow
| but I try not to think of "what ifs".
| PebblesHD wrote:
| Similar to siblings, our medium sized enterprise has a
| procurement process best described as 'avoid if possible', with
| the last product we onboarded taking over 15 months from start
| to finish for around a $50k annual cost. Our likely move will
| be away from docker because we can't afford to be paralysed for
| that long waiting for bureaucrats to make a decision.
|
| If docker wants to play like this they will need to be willing
| to partner with a 'real' services company who is already on a
| range of procurement panels to get a foot in the door, at least
| in my part of the world. If we could pay this as part of our
| MSA with a vendor we already use, $50k a year wouldn't be so
| bad, but adding a new vendor and pushing that uphill? Not
| likely for us.
| mgarciaisaia wrote:
| I'm part of a company that doesn't need to change a thing
| because of this.
|
| I want to move out of Docker services because of the "The new
| terms take effect on August 31, 2021" part of the email I've
| just received, even if it's followed by a "with a grace period
| until January 31, 2022".
|
| I'm OK with them trying to get money. I'm not OK with them
| changing things overnight.
| darkarmani wrote:
| Extortion. They built an entire community of docker users and
| then this. it's one thing if we all knew they were oracle. It's
| another thing for them to turn into Oracle after capturing
| mindshare.
| kcb wrote:
| Because procurement processes suck and developers don't want to
| deal with them. When it's something from Microsoft, Google,
| Amazon, it's not a problem because those deals are handled at a
| level that developers don't interact much with and are
| ingrained as business critical. There's no way we're going to
| have a contract with Docker by January so I fully expect a
| "Please uninstall Docker Desktop" email long before that.
| nickjj wrote:
| What if you asked the person who would write that email to
| instead ask Docker if they can extend the grace period for
| you until you can get a contract set up?
|
| Since it's unclear if / how Docker can enforce their TOS I'm
| guessing they would be happy to extend it because the other
| avenues lead to you not using DD or using it without paying.
| Closi wrote:
| > What if you asked the person who would write that email
| to instead ask Docker if they can extend the grace period
| for you until you can get a contract set up?
|
| I think OP's principle is that it will probably just be
| easier to switch tools than to push the $42k annual spend
| through the organisational mud to get it approved
| (depending on how muddy the mud is).
|
| This is particularly true for a single developer that wants
| to start using docker desktop, if the rest of the org isn't
| already using it.
| Shank wrote:
| "Large" is a bit of an interesting statement. Companies with $10m
| in revenue are very common, and are often smaller companies.
| Software is all about leverage. A very small team can create a
| lot of leverage with the right tools to make a very strong
| product and get to $10m ARR without necessarily having many
| people.
|
| It seems like the real cost to this change is the goodwill from
| smaller companies + teams that are now realizing they'll have
| another expense dropped on them. Except the expense is a
| previously free product with no real improvements, at least from
| what I can tell.
| znpy wrote:
| I've been blandly pushing for podman at work.
|
| Maybe this time management will start listening.
|
| Plus, frankly, podman works reliably well in rootless mode, no
| more messing up with docker in docker, you can be root in you
| container without needing pretty much any privileged resources.
|
| And since podman 3.x you can use docker-compose just pointing it
| to the user rootless podman socket.
|
| And podman can start act like a dumb kubernetes and start pods
| and deployment from the yaml definitions.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Linux containers ought to update and extend their product
| subscriptions too.
| raesene9 wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how well this works out for Docker, I
| have a feeling they'll lose quite a bit of custom but convert
| some to this model.
|
| I'd guess a lot of people will just use Docker engine on a Linux
| VM with the CLI on Windows/Mac as that'll work just fine and is
| open source.
|
| This was kind of inevitable though, ultimately Docker had to find
| a revenue stream somewhere. Docker Hub must be massively
| expensive to run and developing docker's product isn't free
| either...
| syshum wrote:
| There has been a huge push in the community to switch away from
| docker anyway. The warning signs from the company have been
| there for awhile and there are several container engine's,
| systems, UI's and other management tools not built on docker.
|
| This will accelerate those programs
| awestroke wrote:
| Can you link me to a single of those alternatives? It must be
| equally easy to use
| staysafeanon wrote:
| Podman: https://podman.io/
| raesene9 wrote:
| Podman isn't a replacement for Docker Desktop (the
| products in question here).
|
| Podman is closest in function to docker engine, which is
| still open source.
| etxm wrote:
| Honest question: Besides IT endpoint management, why does our
| industry continue to develop software that is leaning more and
| more towards containerization on Mac OS?
|
| I've been a Mac user for 20 years and do a lot of docker and
| Kubernetes work. I recently started developing on a Linux machine
| that was a fourth of the price and a lot less burden for my day-
| to-day work.
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| I mean, your "Besides IT endpoint management" comment is the
| primary reason that most of the jobs that I have worked at
| won't let me get a linux machine.
| flemhans wrote:
| Received an unsolicited mail from them outlining the new terms,
| with no way to unsubscribe.
| paxys wrote:
| Their product and pricing page is extremely vague and full of
| dark patters, and doesn't really describe what "Docker Desktop"
| even is. Can I use the CLI without downloading Docker Desktop?
| Can I launch the daemon and interact with it via the API?
| alanwreath wrote:
| Companies with more than 250 employees or $10 million USD in
| annual revenue must pay a monthly subscription to adhere to the
| new terms of service.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Kind of annoying that Docker Hub and Docker Desktop are both sold
| in one package.
|
| As someone who uses Docker Hub (the public repos) but not Docker
| Desktop (their Windows/Mac proprietary apps), it pisses me to
| have to pay for crap software I don't use nor care about.
|
| Then again, the ecosystem did end up being built to be
| centralised around on single repository, so we did all kinda buy
| into this.
| rkachowski wrote:
| Additionally this change is effective starting August 31st 2021 -
| i.e. now.
| justincormack wrote:
| (CTO of Docker here) there is a grace period until 31 January
| next year, we understand that this is a change and people need
| time to sort out payment.
| jen20 wrote:
| ... isn't it effective January 31st then?
| justincormack wrote:
| Sorry it is a bit confusing, the overall terms and
| conditions update is as of now, but the part about paying
| has a grace period but obviously we want people to know now
| what will apply. The terms are not very different from
| previous terms (although I did get the old no benchmarking
| clause removed, I don't know why we had that there).
| hyperpape wrote:
| > I did get the old no benchmarking clause removed, I
| don't know why we had that there
|
| Your company is probably not going to fare well in this
| thread, but thanks for this! No benchmarking clauses are
| gross. Glad to see someone with the means to remove one
| do so.
| antonyh wrote:
| I would guess it's to do with the abysmal performance
| before WSL2.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| It sounds to me like if you start now you have to pay if
| large enough of a company but if you are already a
| "customer" you have till january.
| [deleted]
| BitterAmethyst wrote:
| Curious how bound I'd be to these terms if I just don't
| upgrade Docker Desktop. I'm not even signed in to dockerhub
| and most of our containers are on an Azure private registry.
| reustle wrote:
| > and people need time to sort out payment
|
| Or their removal of Docker
| adolph wrote:
| I wonder how much Docker is paying Synk.io for 200/mo _Local
| vulnerability scans with Snyk_?
| kcb wrote:
| Overall if they want to charge for their product that's fine. I
| just hate the model of release free or really permissible
| application, wait for widespread adoption, then tighten clamp.
| For what it's worth they've lost my business there.
| codyogden wrote:
| I want to coin it as "embrace, extend, extort."
| benbristow wrote:
| Same with Telerik Fiddler recently. Good piece of software
| for debugging network requests on Windows.
|
| Was free for as long as I've known it existed. Telerik
| recently bought by 'Progress' (ironic), software re-written
| in Electron and now charges a subscription to use it.
|
| Glad HTTP Toolkit is now available free for 'hobbyist' tasks
| - https://httptoolkit.tech/
| pimterry wrote:
| I'm the author of HTTP Toolkit! Just ran into this by
| chance, glad you like it :-D
|
| I should mention here: not only is the core product all
| free, it's also completely open source, even including the
| paid bits (https://github.com/httptoolkit). And those Pro
| features are completely free for all contributors to the
| project.
|
| I've tried to set it up so I couldn't run off with it and
| force everybody to start paying even if I wanted to, but
| any suggestions for further improvements there very
| welcome.
| stavros wrote:
| I love you.
| radus wrote:
| Wow great rec!
| cyral wrote:
| Very accurate for a lot of companies like this lately.
| Consider it coined.
| [deleted]
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nah, newer generations rediscovering the concept of
| shareware and trial/demo versions.
| kcb wrote:
| Not really. Shareware, Trials, Demos all come with the
| expectation that if you want to utilize them fully you
| will eventually need to pay.
| Rexxar wrote:
| The (big) difference is honesty. You know you should pay
| at some point in future if you use shareware/trial/demo
| and find it useful.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Docker desktop was never really free, as in free software, was
| it? If so, then it was always a proprietary app and they were
| always in control. IE. the clamp was always tight.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It was free of charge.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Which is why being free of charge isn't really the point of
| free software.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But not everyone cares about 'libre' software, or thinks
| the simple descriptive term 'free' should be co-opted in
| discussions like you are.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It used to be called shareware.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| So is Docker going to now maintain all the base images themselves
| or do they rely on the community to provide those for free?
|
| Also, announced on 31.08, effective 31.08 (albeit grace
| period...)
| ibly31 wrote:
| I think you wrote the announced and effective dates twice.
| Effective date being 31 of January as far as I can tell. The
| whole point of Docker monetizing Docker Desktop is so that they
| can continue to be funded to maintain the base images
| themselves. That's the primary sell point of DockerHub.
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| Unless I am missing something this is pretty huge. Every company
| I have worked at that has issued MacBooks has had development
| environment instructions which outline using docker desktop
| (since it is the simplest solution). Given this headline every
| one of those companies would have needed to get licensing for
| that.
|
| As others have stated: I am okay with attempting to monetize your
| work, but increasing prices like this (especially from free to a
| pretty pricey per-head subscription model) doesn't sit well with
| me. There doesn't seem to be much differentiation between the
| tier besides: "How many employees/revenue you have" and that is
| not my favorite line of charging.
|
| Does this relate at all to the forced upgrades that were pushed
| earlier this year?
| culpable_pickle wrote:
| Of course it does. Else you could downgrade to a pervious
| release with different licensing and not have to pay...
| techthumb wrote:
| I've been using Minikube's docker-engine and haven't missed
| DockerForMac for some time now.
|
| Minikube sets up a Linux VM using MacOS Hypervisor.
|
| It even has a convenience command to configure docker-cli/docker-
| client. $ minikube docker-env export
| DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY="1" export
| DOCKER_HOST="tcp://192.168.65.11:2376" export
| DOCKER_CERT_PATH="/Users/wibble/.minikube/certs" export
| MINIKUBE_ACTIVE_DOCKERD="minikube"
|
| For corporate situations where MITM proxies are used, you can
| inject/trust custom CAs using $ minikube start
| --embed-certs
|
| https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/handbook/untrusted_certs/
| deusex_ wrote:
| But what minikube backend are you using for this? The preferred
| one is Docker and all the others are also paid on Mac.
| techthumb wrote:
| I am using "hyperkit"
|
| Available options: --driver='': Driver is one
| of: virtualbox, parallels, vmwarefusion, hyperkit, vmware,
| docker, ssh (defaults to auto-detect)
| TheDong wrote:
| > all the others are also paid on Mac
|
| Hyperkit is open source software that works on macOS.
|
| https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/drivers/hyperkit/
|
| Virtualbox is also a free (as in beer, and mostly libre)
| driver that works on all of windows/linux/macOS
| vesinisa wrote:
| Wait, so you're running your app on virtualized Linux
| inside Docker inside Linux inside Virtualbox inside native
| MacOS?
| Spivak wrote:
| That's how it has to work when there's a kernel mismatch
| from host to guest. You're implying more layers than
| there actually are.
|
| - MacOS running a hypervisor
|
| - A Linux VM with Docker installed.
|
| - A Linux container running on that VMs kernel.
|
| Containers on Linux aren't virtualized (normally, you
| could use runV I suppose if you wanted). The only
| overhead is the extra disk space to extract the root fs
| of the container image and the namespacing.
| hda111 wrote:
| You can run systemd in podman or LXD containers.
|
| LXC was the first container implementation on Linux and
| uses full Linux systems similar to a VM.
| _joel wrote:
| It's spinning pinwheels all the way down
| TheDong wrote:
| That's a reductive way to phrase it, but more or less
| yes.
|
| It's arguable if the container is "virtualized linux" as
| they all share a single linux kernel. In reality there's
| one virtual machine, one linux kernel, and many linux
| userspaces (one per container), which is kinda the whole
| point of containers.
|
| Over docker+linux, the virtual machine is the only
| additional layer.
|
| fwiw, I personally don't use macOS, so I've only got
| virtualized linux (containers) run by docker running on
| linux running on my hardware.
|
| Are you trying to make a point or something here? Like,
| yes, we've built layers of abstraction that include
| different types of virtualization (VMs and containers),
| and they compose. Is that all you're observing?
| vesinisa wrote:
| > Are you trying to make a point or something here?
|
| Nah, just curious/intrigued by how these stack.
|
| OS-level virtualization is very much a thing. I'd be
| interesting to compare this to the approach taken by
| Docker Dekstop for Mac. I bet they do something quite
| similar (hypervisor-based virtualization like Virtualbox)
| - nothing fancy like WSL1 that I believe runs a sort of
| "tortured" Linux kernel _inside_ the NT kernel.
| simiones wrote:
| WSL1 didn't run a Linux kernel at all - it was
| implementing the Linux user-space API over the Windows NT
| kernel. Well, some of it - not enough to run Docker, for
| example.
|
| Docker on Windows and Mac does the same as what is
| described above - it runs a Linux VM and runs the docker
| server inside that, and then does a little magic to
| expose native OS paths and so on to that VM. On Windows,
| it uses WSL2 by default now, but WSL2 is also a Hyper-V
| VM in the end, with some Windows magic to blend it more
| nicely in Windows workflows.
| amazingman wrote:
| I'm also using Hyperkit w/ minikube, and after some heavy
| setup automation it works pretty great. What I worry about,
| though, is what I'm going to do when I switch to a Mac w/
| Apple Silicon. AFAICT Hyperkit is x64-only.
| truffdog wrote:
| Hyperkit is docker for mac's backend though, so... whatever
| bugs that upset people are probably still present.
| tensor wrote:
| Beware of VirtualBox. While part of it is free, it's not
| very useful without the extension package. This package is
| easy to download on the same website as VirtualBox, but...
| it's not free.
|
| Even better Oracle tracks the ips that download this
| extension and after a suitable amount of time they will
| come knocking on your company's door asking for an
| insulting amount of money (e.g. more expensive than VMware)
| or get sued. You need to read the fine print of the
| additional Eula printed in really small letters on the
| VirtualBox website to figure out the extension isn't free.
| It's almost a honeypot tactic. Scummy.
| folmar wrote:
| I don't know how Macs fare, but on Linux the extension
| package is not really a great feat, mostly adds RDP and
| some faster USB modes, but USB passthrough is marginal at
| most anyway.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| Before Docker Desktop there existed a solution called docker
| toolkit that worked exactly like this. The only problem is that
| occasionally internal corporate networks will use the same ip
| address and you have to customize that by building your own
| docker engine.
| qeternity wrote:
| So many people in this thread don't understand how enterprise
| decisions get made.
|
| The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality.
|
| Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the
| workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of
| software for $250/year?
|
| Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will
| just pay this. I see so many people saying "just do these 10
| steps and it's basically the same". It just ain't worth it for
| $250
| fnord77 wrote:
| > Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize
| the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece
| of software for $250/year?
|
| YES! I've seen it. Stinginess at my shop regularly causes hours
| and hours of pricey engineering resources to address problems
| caused by underallocating cloud resources to the point things
| fail - or refusal to allow some cloud service because it will
| cost $100/month (despite saving 10s of thousands in eng
| resources)
|
| It's crazy but I bet it happens many places.
| aprdm wrote:
| That math changes a lot in companies that don't sell tech as
| their profits margin aren't as fat. It also changes when you
| have 1000s of developers.
| efsavage wrote:
| Many engineers at large companies won't want to bother dealing
| with the headaches around licensing software and spending
| money, whether it's $2/mo or $21/mo or $200/mo.
|
| If it's a core part of my job and the best option available,
| it'd be worth it, but if there's _any_ reasonable alternative,
| I 'll go download that today instead of wading through all of
| the lawyers and approvals and compliance to use something
| slightly better.
| dheera wrote:
| If you're getting started, sure.
|
| If you already have a live deployment then the company's
| bigger fear is the a risk of switching to a completely new
| infrastructure and they'll all of a sudden push the paperwork
| quickly to stay on their existing codebase.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Even when the purchase process has been streamlined it's
| still a headache for a piece of software I might only use 1-2
| times a year.
| __s wrote:
| I work at a large company. I added a USE_PODMAN environment
| variable for devs to use within an hour of finding out about
| this
|
| But maybe my company is too large; large enough companies can
| have smaller teams, other teams will probably go the licensing
| route
| isoprophlex wrote:
| That's not how it works in my experience. If it costs more than
| 0 but less than 10k, the pencil pushers at procurement wont
| even answer your emails...
| lmilcin wrote:
| You are using logic.
|
| That's not how corporations work.
|
| I work remotely for large corporation (over 100k employees) and
| it wastes on average an hour of my productivity every day on
| stupid stuff. For example my office PC becomes unavailable
| every time it gets an update, at least once a week. They force
| restart during working hours. If there is somebody in the
| office I can call them to reboot it, if not I have to drive
| there. Everybody has the same problem. Meetings are disrupted,
| plans are thrown in disarray, people are loosing sometimes
| entire day of work.
|
| The problem has been known before covid and has not been
| solved.
|
| Any normal logical person would throw resources into solving
| the problem, but the people responsible just say they are busy
| and why is that a big problem if you can just press reboot?
| katzgrau wrote:
| That would be the wise thing to do, but I'm sure there are some
| ways companies will eff it up anyway. Survival of the fittest I
| guess.
|
| Management may want some badge of honor for saving a budget
| line item. Or developers may want to embark on a new and
| interesting project and successfully convince management it's a
| good idea, who will agree for a wide range of reasons (not
| pissing off developers might be one of them).
|
| Both will ignore the risk and considerable downsides. Happens
| all the time.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| It's not at all about the price. Obviously a corporation can
| afford that. It's the sheer dread of even starting the
| procurement process in your average corporation that your
| average developer must overcome, that is the barrier.
|
| I'd rather investigate an alternative like running it on a VM
| than deal with that. Actually I'd rather shave my face with
| some mace in the dark than deal with that.
| Aqueous wrote:
| $21 / user / month - so if you have 100 engineers that's $2100
| a month or $25k a year.
|
| Still should be doable for most businesses that size but
| licensing costs can blow up when you start to have a lot of
| seats. An annoying thing about the company I work for is that
| they have a limited number of licenses for things like IDEs, so
| they ration them. And so I'll boot up an IDE for a language I
| work in less - like say, PyCharm - and it will stop working
| because my license got taken away and given to someone else.
| I'll have to request another one be given back to get working
| again, which is pretty annoying when I'm trying to get
| something done. I work mostly with Docker / Kubernetes so if
| I'm in a situation where my core tools are being constantly
| taken away, I'll be pretty miffed.
|
| I agree that Docker has every right to charge big companies for
| this software. Just wanted to point out that the costs can be
| more than you'd expect.
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize
| the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece
| of software for $250/year?
|
| Hahahahaha, yes, absolutely. Because if the wrong VP gets this
| in his head, it's not $250/year, it's "almost half a million
| dollars over 3 years" for the 500 employees or whatever. I've
| seen it happen.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize
| the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece
| of software for $250/year?
|
| Not just "think" - I know for a fact.
|
| Finance refuses to spend money if there is a "free"
| alternative, and Architecture rejects all software that isn't
| OSS licensed without a lengthy review process. It would take us
| at least 3 months to get approvals and POs for all the devs, if
| it even got approved, but more likely it would be in "batches"
| of licenses, further delaying roll-out. So instead the devs are
| beginning to install Linux VMs to run Docker from, or looking
| at podman.
|
| People forget that just because there's a "rational" decision,
| doesn't mean people (or businesses) will choose it. Businesses
| are run by humans, and humans are irrational and dumb. Path of
| least resistance wins.
| dominotw wrote:
| > $250k/year
|
| fuck..i need to find a new job
| raffraffraff wrote:
| True. Absolutely. But I guarantee you that this headline means
| that even junior "devops" engineers will have workable
| alternatives by _tomorrow_ , and can tell you how to implement
| them with little friction.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| That sort of depends on the size of business under discussion.
| If you are a Fortune 500 with 2,000 engineers who all need
| licenses... half a million in licensing costs is not always the
| easiest sell.
|
| Of course, that fortune 500 is going to pick up the phone and
| demand to pay 1/4 of that (and they'll probably get it).
| Enterprise sales is _fun_
| otterley wrote:
| *Actual fun may vary.
| martin-adams wrote:
| I once got told my my manager to reduce the cost of my email
| inbox on the server and download it to my local machine.
|
| This was email provided and owned by the very company I worked
| for, and it was costing enough for management to care.
|
| Maybe enterprises have changed since then, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if stuff like this does start asking questions as
| it's a new cost on a budget.
| Cacti wrote:
| lol obviously you've never worked in a giant bureaucratic
| corporation.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post personal swipes or unsubstantive comments.
|
| If you know more than other people, that's great, but then
| please share some of what you know so the rest of us can
| learn. If you can't do that or don't want to, that's fine,
| but then please don't post.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.
| ..
| qeternity wrote:
| Lol obviously you've never risen to a level of management in
| a giant corporation.
|
| It's ok. Just keep telling yourself you're smarter than
| everyone else.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site
| guidelines yourself. Not cool.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The business license costs $21/month
|
| No, it costs $21/user/month.
|
| > Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize
| the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece
| of software for $250/year?
|
| I work for a big enterprise that is currently going through a
| transition that is simultaneously a cloud transition and a
| transition to more critically consider tooling with license
| management overhead (which for a $21/seat license, is probably
| a significantly larger cost in a big, bureaucratic enterprise
| than the license cost itself.)
|
| That said, there's a good argument that the things that you get
| for that $21/seat are things many enterprises will find are
| still worth the license cost + license management overhead. On
| the other hand, most of that is stuff that doesn't scale with
| number of developer seats, so a subscription model that doesn't
| work on that basis and therefore doesn't impose the kind of
| license management overhead that per-seat licensing does would
| probably net Docker more revenue while imposing less total
| costs on enterprises.
| qeternity wrote:
| > No, it costs $21/user/month.
|
| Do you guys not realize that I know that? I did the maths
| standardized to one seat.
|
| I'm not also suggesting that the entire engineering spend for
| 100+ person companies is $250k/year.
|
| Do the analysis on a per unit cost because that's how life
| works: per unit cost of human capital and per unit cost of
| software vs. per unit value creation.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Do you guys not realize that I know that?
|
| Did you not read the rest of the post? I think you knew the
| license fee was per seat, I think you just think you failed
| (and fail, still) to understand the significance of that on
| the actual cost to the business imposed, of which the
| license fee itself is only a fraction.
| ryan_lane wrote:
| Local dev environments are used because it's what people are
| used to, and they're low friction to start using. The problem
| is that they're actually quite difficult to maintain at scale.
| Large businesses spend a considerable amount of time debugging
| local developer environments. Cloud IDEs have been popping up
| and are finally to the point of being usable (and in some cases
| even better than a local dev env).
|
| My company was already somewhat interested in checking out
| hosted IDEs, and today this pushed us to start some proof of
| concepts to move some teams over to github's codespaces.
|
| So, yes, businesses will adjust their workflows to avoid the
| cost since many were already interested in improving their
| workflows and relieving some of the burden on their developer
| environment tooling teams.
| andix wrote:
| From my experience: Yes, they may jeopardize it.
|
| If docker and containerization is not yet widely used in the
| company, a lot of decisionmakers will not buy it, because they
| did fine without it for decades ;)
| tyingq wrote:
| >Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize
| the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece
| of software for $250/year?
|
| Tech companies? No, they will probably cough up until they have
| another solution.
|
| IT departments in non-tech companies? Yes. I fully expect a
| circus there. Many won't have known it was being used,
| purchasing will have their ego bruised by a company "hijacking"
| them and won't want to pay, and so on.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Yeah that's great in theory. In practice you have to go to the
| official route (tm). Here's some of my experiences:
|
| 1) Internship at a well known tech corporation. I was on a
| project that would accelerate the debugging and diagnostic of a
| machine the whole factory depended on; tl;dr I was making an
| app to replace an overgrown Excel sheet. To do that we used an
| opensource library but the catch was that the maintainer made
| its money by placing the documentation under a paywall. At some
| point the project was going well but the leftovers from Google
| Code could not do anymore. So it took two months (TWO MONTHS!)
| to do a $15 USD one time payment with the company's credit
| card. Apparently the process took longer due to the fact we had
| to go through PayPal.
|
| 2) Another multi billion corporation, less big but still
| multinational. They spent hours and lots of money on internal
| propaganda to promote their "core values"; which of course
| included "agility". We wanted to buy a commercial code analysis
| tool to save time during code reviews and increase code quality
| of a code base where ~30 devs worked. No brainier right? We had
| the R&D department's VP's OK to buy the damn thing and ask for
| forgiveness to the mother ship later. After 6 months our team
| leader was still receiving calls and and form to fill. "Do you
| _really_ need this? Did you think about other products? Did you
| have the OK from this person thousand of miles away and this
| other person who speaks in a very broken English? " Using the
| company's internal organism and salary tables we estimated that
| during those six months they have wasted about 5 years of
| licensing in salary.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The places where I worked there's an inverse relationship - the
| smaller the cost, the harder it is to justify with finances.
| ($4000 monthly AWS bill for "testing purposes"? No questions
| asked. $10 wireless mouse? Mission impossible!)
| WhatsName wrote:
| In case you aren't aware, it's easy to explain by that fact
| that most finance departments are afraid to question your
| spendings on grounds of looking incompetent.
|
| So it's less about 10$ and more about: "I understand what a
| wireless mouse is and it doesn't look mission critical to
| me."
|
| "No idea what those items on that AWS bill mean, but I'll
| probably be better off not asking"
| Tarsul wrote:
| he, well said. It's basically the bike shed effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
| xenadu02 wrote:
| If you must exist in this kind of organization use this to
| your advantage. Get involved in important projects, setup
| purchase proposals, then make sure you add in new laptops,
| cables, mice, extra monitors, and whatever other
| accessories you need. Do you have a remote KVM attached to
| all 100 servers? Yes. Will finance care if you add 100
| monitors, keyboards, mice, etc? Nope. Will your vendor
| happily add those on to the price? Yup. How do you get
| involved in projects? Find a Director or VP who wants to
| get something done and say "yes" or "we'll find a way" to
| whatever it is they want to do. Then do your research and
| give them a proposal: "We can accomplish X in 24 months
| with Y headcount and Z equipment budget". If you can
| cultivate a reputation as someone who "gets things done"
| eventually you will find the normal rules no longer apply
| to you. Finance will stop asking questions about your
| projects.
|
| You have three rational choices: 1. Play the game, 2. Keep
| your head down, 3. Quit and move to a company that doesn't
| play those games.
|
| Sitting around complaining that a big company has crappy
| inefficient processes is like complaining that water is
| wet. A complete waste of time and makes you look
| incompetent to other people in the company who _are_
| playing the game. These inefficient processes end up
| optimizing for people who know how to talk the code and
| cultivate the right relationships. Take advantage of that.
| [deleted]
| jacurtis wrote:
| Yep, large companies work like congress.
|
| First you need something core to start a bill around.
| Let's make a law that makes it easier to buy guns.
|
| But no one is going to vote for that, so let's give it a
| name you CAN'T say no to. It will henceforth be known as
| "The Child and Family Home Protection Act".
|
| Great we have a cool name and we have a law significant
| enough to send to the floor of congress. Now let's get
| enough people to promise to vote for it so we don't waste
| our time. Oh, Congressman X says that he would vote for
| it as long as we add another law about funding polar bear
| research. Sure, whatever just add it in, we need the
| votes. Congresswoman Y says she will vote for it if we
| add a law about requiring masks at church. We need the
| votes, tack it on. Congressman Z has been trying to get
| more tanks sent to Afghanistan for nearly a decade, if we
| add that in I bet he will vote for out law too.
|
| Then these things get bundled up and sent to the floor
| where people vote on laws with fun marketing names added
| to them.
|
| The same thing happens in business. You start off with a
| core project like a new ERP system. Give it a complex
| sounding name that no one in accounts payable will say no
| to. Then we add in a bunch of computers into the budget
| that we have been trying to get for 2 years. Add a new
| printer. Throw in some docker desktop licenses for our
| developers, and then bundle it up and send it to Accounts
| Payable. Bam, now you have docker desktop licenses and
| new computers. You're welcome.
| ev1 wrote:
| You forgot a critical part of bill names - there has to
| be a terribly forced backronym made out of it.
| noir_lord wrote:
| "2.4Ghz Laser Based Human Interface Device, $10" seems
| cheap approved.
| [deleted]
| aenis wrote:
| Too cheap. Been in a few places where getting 700k for
| something with a boring but plausible name was a no
| questions asked thing, but trying to get a $15 miro board
| license was literally impissible. I paid for a lot of
| tools out of my own pocket to avoid the hassle. I bet I
| am not alone with this approach.
| thevagrant wrote:
| Agree. I have subsidized places where I worked due to
| this. Bosses often say - oh don't pay yourself but then
| when you put in the request for something months will go
| by waiting for that certain manager to say yes or no.
| Face to face or on the phone it's easy to get a 'yes but
| first send me the proposal/information', only then to get
| ignored. Yeah you can keep pushing and finally get the
| item you need months later, but by then the project is
| over cause you or someone else hacked together or found a
| free solution... or worse used a personal credit card.
| pharindoko wrote:
| ;D damn right.... Wanted to buy a css framework extension for
| 50$ - Mission impossible ..
| qeternity wrote:
| Exactly. Cost is a proxy for importance (usually). I can't be
| bothered to approve your $10 mouse, but I can be bothered to
| approve your $10k AWS budget.
| regularfry wrote:
| I honestly don't think I could get Docker Desktop through our
| procurement process before the end of the grace period. It's
| not a matter of "this is peanuts" as much as "we're guaranteed
| to breach the license terms if we keep using this thing, so
| everyone has to get off it _now_. " And then once it's gone,
| we'll limp along with whatever plugs the gap until something
| else emerges a as a winner, which probably won't be Docker
| Desktop.
| truffdog wrote:
| This reminds me of the genius of AWS. The engineering team
| can just buy whatever they want, no questions asked.
| hughrr wrote:
| Hey we get asked plenty of questions when the bill comes in
| :)
| namdnay wrote:
| That's assuming some kind soul in engineering management has
| the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of
| purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc...
|
| Another likely outcome is that it's "easier" for teams to
| switch to another tool (easier in that at least they're not
| waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot
| of time
|
| Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this
| kind of situation
| marcosdumay wrote:
| This.
|
| Buying anything on my organization costs something around
| $10k. Add your price to this to discover the total we are
| spending.
|
| That's on financial cost. The opportunity cost of stopping
| technical people to handle the technical details of an
| acquisition is just huge, and larger the most differentiation
| there is on the market.
| mc32 wrote:
| Sometimes you can put these things on CC rather than P.O.
| ithkuil wrote:
| You can drill through layers of that crap if you can sell
| something through aws marketplace or equivalent thing that
| your company is already set up to spend millions a month.
|
| Not sure how would that work for a desktop tool. It's in them
| to figure that out though
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| Perhaps you're not understanding corporate bureaucracy.
| Nobody wants to be the manager who gets fired for trying to
| save $25k by switching from Docker Desktop to {insert random
| open source project here}. Not only is it not worth the time
| or the risk, but the engineering manager's exact purpose is
| to traverse the corporate bureaucracy. It gives them job
| security. Plus the engineering manager can negotiate big
| discounts with the vendor and can brag about that on their
| own performance reviews.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's not the manager, it's some department somewhere else
| that'll take weeks to respond and then you'll have to chat
| with them about it and they'll be like "i don't see why
| this is necessary"
| oneplane wrote:
| That is not the point he was making. It's about wanting to
| get the licenses procured but the process being
| unreasonably laborious so people just don't bother. The
| problem isn't cost, it's the mess of corporate wastelands.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I really doubt that procurement is going to be harder than
| switching a technology out.
| JanisL wrote:
| Entirely depends on the organization, I used to think this
| too but then I encountered some organizations (granted ones
| with entirely dysfunctional procurement processes) where
| switching technologies was easier and less risky to
| schedules than going down the procurement process. The risk
| of missing deadlines and blowing out schedules is the
| factor that tends to be on people's minds when procurement
| is brutally slow.
| racecar789 wrote:
| Easier method to deal with monthly payment...Create a
| purchase order with 12 lines. One line for each month with
| dollar amounts defined. The purchase order serves as the
| "approval" so Accounts Payable can process without asking for
| coding information.
|
| Example: I only have to revisit licensing once a year, to
| create a new 12 line purchase order. It's still a pain but I
| prefer purchase orders vs dealing with credit cards. In
| addition, querying expense history for purchase order lines
| provides far more detail vs querying a credit card platform.
| Credit card history tends to go into a black hole.
|
| One possible hitch...Some companies might restrict Accounts
| Payable from receiving purchase orders for separation-of-
| duties reasons.
| posterboy wrote:
| > Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this
| kind of situation
|
| What situation, being trapped? I'm not sure what size has to
| do with it. Are small corporations maybe more ... agile?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've been fortunate enough to work at companies where
| engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It
| works well for a while, but eventually everyone accumulates a
| lot of random recurring charges and the company cracks down.
|
| $21 is nothing for a one-time spend.
|
| $21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but
| now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and
| accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some
| juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before
| that person can get started.
|
| It's not bad when it's just a couple key pieces of software,
| but it doesn't take long before every engineer has some mix
| of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses
| and you're on the phone with a different vendor every week
| doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation
| dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer
| to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get
| tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price
| they're asking.
|
| Soon, all of those "cheap" tools have added up to $1000/month
| or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to
| managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of
| the time. And it's terrible.
|
| When the tool isn't easily replaceable, you deal with it. I'm
| not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get
| a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with
| licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop
| license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how
| to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can
| remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate
| toward the latter.
| physicsguy wrote:
| > When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a
| ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their
| Docker Desktop license
|
| that's how it's worked for me - in my last job spent 3
| weeks waiting for a Qt License, Intel compiler license,
| MSVC license...
| danudey wrote:
| Our company has a lot of processes that could be
| streamlined via containerization of build and development
| environments, across Windows, Mac, and Linux.
|
| But arguing for $252/yr times a thousand developers (in the
| office I work in, at least; we have others elsewhere) is
| just untenable. If the value was there for us, then we
| could get it signed off on, but there's no way to _build_
| that value because now it 's too expensive to get started.
| cies wrote:
| > requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-
| around times
|
| This! I've always said that a bit reason for FLOSS to win
| over the internet server-side is because scaling fast and
| juggling livenses is just too hard. Especially with the
| prying eyes of Oracle/MSFT/etc's powerful legal teams and
| hidden "phone home" code.
|
| Going with a LAMP stack was just to simplest way to keep
| moving at speed.
| londons_explore wrote:
| What would have happened if Microsoft had put some clause
| in volume licenses that said "you can use a system
| unlicensed for up to 30 days before paying for a
| license".
|
| Then engineering can spin up loads of instances to test
| stuff and scale fast with minimal hassle, and it'll be
| the purchasing team playing catchup later, no longer in
| the decisionmaking path.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| People do that with EAs. Once they figure out that it's
| happening, they have various means to detect it.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| that trick might work once or twice, until a hard policy
| comes into effect after the company gets burned.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| For non-prod/qa/testing/dev stuff Microsoft provides
| MSDN/Visual Studio Subscriptions which provide specially
| licensed versions of their operating systems and
| software. Everyone who uses the MSDN software must have
| their own subscription and it can't be used by real
| users/customers except in a limited dev/test capacity
| (e.g. UAT).
| acdha wrote:
| One other big factor: certain other vendors have very
| aggressive sales tactics which essentially boil down to
| "buy a bunch of stuff you don't need or we'll audit every
| computer in your company and charge a penalty for anything
| we can find to quibble with".
|
| Docker doesn't need to actually do that to run afoul of
| policies based on the scar tissue from those other vendors.
| Simply going from "you can use it without being sued" to
| "we have to pay people to make sure we'll win" will
| increase the perceived cost at many large shops.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Yup, this is the concern. Having been kindly asked by
| Oracle to remove virtualbox extensions, this sort of
| gotcha/conditional pricing feels dangerous
| acdha wrote:
| The big thing for me is the question of the future: they
| say they currently won't be predatory about it[1] and I
| have no reason to doubt that the people saying that are
| being completely honest, but we don't know who will be
| working there in the future or where the next
| acquisition/merger will take them.
|
| Without a contract, it's hard to disagree with the policy
| types who are going to ask what protects the organization
| if that happens. Once you go down this path even a
| little, the barriers to entry at large organizations go
| up since you have to look at it from the perspective of
| both the upfront cost and possible future cost / off-
| ramps.
|
| 1. https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston/status/143272649295
| 845376...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Docker is a company that won't exist in a few years, so a
| promise of leniency now means nothing.
|
| When they are merged into some other big company, that
| company will look to milk the cow by going after license
| compliance. It happens every time.
| robocat wrote:
| Some years back I tried to pay the $50 for the VBox
| extensions - small company and I was the only user. They
| were very confused, almost like they couldn't understand
| that I really wanted to pay for something that I judged
| good value for the money.
|
| They ended up telling me to forget about it.
|
| I guess that perhaps they only want to target large
| businesses.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Fixing this has to be a great business opportunity. Surely
| someone is already working on it?
| danudey wrote:
| A simple local k8s installation with a simple but
| effective GUI on top, running containerd instead of
| docker and with a CLI wrapper for docker commands, would
| be more than enough for everything I need.
| mook wrote:
| My team is working on https://rancherdesktop.io/ and it's
| scary how closely matches we're doing (depending on what
| you consider to be effective UI)...
| wahern wrote:
| Someone making $250k/year shouldn't think twice dropping
| $21/month on a tool that truly makes them more productive.
|
| A year or two ago I bought a personal license to Ubuntu
| FIPS after being urgently asked to debug an issue w/
| Python's OpenSSL bindings. Unsurprisingly it turned out
| that my company had an enterprise license, and had I known
| whom to contact (which I didn't), I could have gotten a
| license key in a couple of days. But why waits days and
| potentially many thousands of dollars of time when I could
| buy a license _now_ and get started immediately?
|
| Frankly, it's weird how Silicon Valley employees making
| obscene amounts of money balk at personal expenses as if
| they're some minimum wage employee being victimized by
| their employer nickel-and-diming them. But that's just me.
| In fact, except at startups, Silicon Valley corporations
| neither expect this nor even give you credit for taking
| such initiative.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that
| shouldn't be followed. Because it hides the true cost of
| a project, which may result in poor decisions later on.
| Because the cost of a decision/process should fall on the
| person or company who has the ability to change it.
| Because using wages to pay for business expenses wasn't
| part of the employment agreement. Any one of these would
| suffice.
|
| For personal expenses (meaning expenses for my own hobby
| projects, not "personal expenses" to mean business
| expenses paid by an employee as you have used it), $21
| would be a quick decision. But using that same $21 to
| shore up a faulty requisition process? Nope, not at all.
| pbowyer wrote:
| > Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that
| shouldn't be followed.
|
| It also allows small creators to survive.
|
| I'm working on hybrid mobile apps again after a long
| break. The number of essential packages in both the
| Ionic/Capacitor/Cordova and React Native ecosystems that
| are "looking for maintainers" (think: camera
| functionality) and have long lists of issues is frankly
| astounding, given the number of users of said packages.
|
| An expectation to pay so the maintainers can maintain is
| a good thing in my book.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Except that's not the issue being discussed here.
| Expecting to pay for software development isn't a bad
| thing. Expecting the employee to pay out of pocket for
| business expenses is the exploitative behavior.
| wahern wrote:
| The problem is that there's simply no easy fix for these
| bureaucratic frictions and sub-optimal equilibriums. It's
| the nature of large organizations--they trade
| efficiencies in some areas for inefficiencies in others.
|
| I decided long ago not to worry about such expenses
| because 1) the engineer in me hates this inefficiency and
| urges me to fix or work around it (depending on your
| perspective), 2) navigating bureaucratic red tape takes a
| personal toll, and as someone who is paid well I don't
| mind at all spending a trivial amount of money for my own
| wellbeing, even if its for work, and 3) as someone who
| has worked in startups and even founded one, I've both
| been in a position where I was expected to take on such
| expenses and expected others to do the same (at least as
| an initial matter[1]).
|
| [1] The dilemma is that unless the purchaser faces some
| risk of incurring the expense themself, they're not as
| incentivized to consider the reasonableness of the
| purchase. The solution is either 1) requiring permission
| beforehand, or 2) hiring more mature employees who
| understand the nature of the dilemma and who have already
| factored this responsibility and risk into their
| negotiated compensation. The latter doesn't scale,
| though, which is why large organizations invariably
| regress to the former.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| A couple comments earlier people were talking about where
| does this stop, 1000$ a month? A 3D CAD license with the
| ability to do FEA is around 30 grand a year, I've seen
| seats of specialized software cost north of 100k a year
| per seat, and that's for people that 100k is probably
| pretty close to their take home.
|
| So where does it stop? Is 250$ ok but 1000 isn't?
|
| I think we've set the line just fine, if you want to
| cover opex out of pocket, cool. But don't try to put that
| on people who can't afford it.
| strken wrote:
| It's not about $x a month, it's about the friction of
| dropping any money at all. It could be 10c/year and still
| annoy everyone, because now they have to go through a
| procurement process, find someone with a company credit
| card, wrangle with reimbursement forms, etc.
|
| Docker arguably should be charging more for it. The
| friction between $0 and $21/month is higher than the
| friction between $21/month and $60/month in a lot of
| ways.
| antupis wrote:
| This 1000x developers are lazy and generally don't want
| go throug bureaucratic hassle. Long run this just going
| to hurt docker when developers start using podman or some
| other free alternative.
| gfosco wrote:
| As someone who went from the PA suburbs and small IT
| shops (where 75k was a premium salary) to the SF startup
| scene and Facebook, one of the observations that has
| stuck with me was the incredible cheapness of my wealthy
| tech peers. It's hard to explain unless you've been
| around people who do a whole lot more with a whole lot
| less.
| wreath wrote:
| I noticed this exact same thing in my ex-FAANG
| colleagues. No judgment, just an observation.
| [deleted]
| dx034 wrote:
| For companies it's not that easy though. Employees will
| accumulate services and don't cancel them, will leave
| without leaving any info on which services were bought
| for what purposes etc. Companies still need proper
| invoices and account for all charges. If they cannot
| accomplish this because employees forgot they bought
| services or have left without letting anyone know, the
| company is on the hook for it.
|
| Having worked with procurement departments I can
| understand very well why employees should never be able
| to make purchasing decisions without someone from
| procurement in the loop.
| argomo wrote:
| Heh heh... so true it hurts. Why spend 3 years pushing it
| past risks reviews and oversight committees when you could
| just write a crappy version that does what you need?
|
| Legal alone will spend months looking at run-of-the-mill
| software contacts trying to negotiate absurd concessions from
| vendors in situations where they clearly have no bargaining
| power.
|
| We can spend a lot of money on Oracle for their profoundly
| obtuse products though.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > trying to negotiate absurd concessions from vendors in
| situations where they clearly have no bargaining power
|
| I got front-line seats at a company with tens of millions
| in revenue try to get payment processor to remove escrow
| terms from the contract.
|
| Said company got blocked at tier 2 support. They refused to
| escalate for a company who wasn't a customer, especially
| when legal stuff was involved. Tier 2 had a script
| specifically for people like us.
|
| I regret not bringing popcorn to that phone call.
|
| In short: "Those aren't our terms; those are the terms of a
| billion-dollar bank. Sign it or leave."
|
| They were very much not impressed with our claim to being
| the second-largest widget maker in the world.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| OpEx is much easier to get vs CapX. That's why so many things
| are subscription now. (also Sarbaines Oxley pushed vendors
| into subscription models)
| rwallace wrote:
| Now I'm curious: Sarbanes-Oxley pushed vendors into
| subscription models? How? What exactly did it change in the
| cost-benefit picture?
| jdwithit wrote:
| This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies
| I have. Plenty of them would _gladly_ burn 10x what it would
| cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours
| switching something that 's inferior but free. Because it
| doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget.
|
| The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot
| of business leaders.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If someone suggests a tool that costs $1k/yr over a free
| tool that costs $5k/year in extra work, I'm going to die on
| the free tool hill. Because the $1k/yr tool will disappear
| when the company goes defunct, or it won't interoperate
| with something else and there is no way of fixing it. Or it
| can't migrate to the next tool. Or we need to upgrade to an
| enterprise license because we become 21 developers instead
| of 20. Or they just bump the cost to $20k for whatever
| reason. Or the tool won't work on CI servers because it
| only works after entering a key in an attended install (yes
| this is still a thing).
|
| Free tools have a predictable and stable cost.
|
| I have probably been burned more times from free tools over
| the years, but the scars aren't as deep. It's just a shrug
| and hoping the other project works when the first doesn't.
| Closi wrote:
| > Free tools have a predictable and stable cost.
|
| Unless they suddenly turn from free into a $21/month per
| person fee.
| 10000truths wrote:
| I think he means free as in open source, rather than free
| as in freeware. In which the worst case scenario is that
| you are stuck with the last open-source version, but at
| least you retain full control over your fork of the code
| and can add features and bug fixes as you see fit.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Indeed. Proprietary/Closed-source but costing $0 is the
| worst of both worlds.
| bluGill wrote:
| Then I'll find the fork and use that. We have already
| done that a few times. There is a reason we audit all the
| licenses of open source software we have.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| A big advantage of using free open source software is that
| the licensing prices will never increase because the
| company needs a new revenue stream to support its business
| model.
|
| Docker Desktop was free, now it's $21/month, what will it
| cost next year when Docker needs more money?
| sokoloff wrote:
| That depends on how many frogs contentedly stay in the
| pot.
| rchaud wrote:
| Licensing prices might not increase, but paid technical
| support costs could theoretically be unlimited.
| Especially if you're at the mercy of an open-source
| software that isn't well-maintained.
| sokoloff wrote:
| A lot of the driver here is not in the moment short-
| sightedness, but rather a byproduct of the procurement or
| other finance processes (ironically often instituted with
| intent to prevent waste and fraud or make the company more
| efficient).
|
| It's not just the $250/yr/dev, but rather the requirements
| to create a new vendor in the ERP morass, to get approvals
| for an exception to the standards for payment terms (and/or
| methods), any requirements for vetting vendors, etc.
|
| If you're selling to an enterprise, don't charge just above
| whatever the "employees can put it on their card without
| approval". If you're going to exceed that, you might as
| well exceed it by a lot. (If you're going to make every
| developer file an expense report every month, I can readily
| prefer to do a lot of command line typing rather than
| filing an expense report... If I automate that for a lot of
| my fellow devs, I get to do something fun and be a minor
| folk hero.)
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
| rubber-...
| zapita wrote:
| A lot of those enterprises already have Docker on the
| vendor list though, because of Docker Hub.
| jen20 wrote:
| I suspect that most people running at the kind of scale
| where purchasing is hugely problematic are also running
| Artifactory or similar, not using Docker Hub.
| treeman79 wrote:
| I've seen companies burn half a million in developer time
| to save 10k or less several times.
|
| Oh some JavaScript graphing library is expensive. Let's
| roll our own!
|
| Heroku meets our needs 100% let's spend millions to switch
| to K8 and have a much worse experience.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The 4 hours I spent learning the basics of d3 and then
| couple hours a night for a few weeks working through
| examples (of others and of my own design) really gave me
| a powerful new tool for charting applications. Rolling
| your own is difficult to justify, but "learn and use d3
| (BSD licensed)" seems an entirely reasonable alternative
| to a high-priced commercial offering.
| grp000 wrote:
| How much of that is developers doing it because they want
| to make something new?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a
| lot of business leaders.
|
| A lot of it is that opportunity cost really isn't the
| problem of many business units. I spent a week building a
| crappy version of codecov for our few repos.
|
| Dev won't get in trouble for that because opportunity cost
| isn't a thing for us as a cost centre.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Unless there is a security audit and the dev has to
| justify why non authorized software is on the company
| network.
| version_five wrote:
| Exactly. I've never understood why capital or cash expense
| costs are valued so much differently than salary costs.
| I've had jobs (like any manager) where I have complete
| leeway on how I "spend" millions of dollars of people's
| time, but had to to through all kinds of approval to spend
| even the smallest amount of money.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| graft is a serious issue with purchase orders, its much
| less of an issue with salaries.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| There are a few reasons:
|
| - Reviewing purchases should put some reasonable controls
| around how much software you can accumulate. Adding to
| the tech stack has maintenance costs, and you don't
| really want to do it without some sort of review. In this
| case, it's not the dollars as much as the fit.
|
| - With SaaS tools in particular, there are often privacy
| or security concerns. Those teams should review. Probably
| want legal's eyes on it to get the right terms in place
| as well. Again, less about the dollars here, and more
| about the agreement, risk, required disclosures
| (subprocessor, etc), and those kinds of factors.
|
| - On the spend itself, you'd be surprised how this adds
| up, especially if folks are signing multi-year deals and
| not bothering to negotiate licensing. Remember, if it's
| easy for you and me to buy, it's easy for everyone else
| to buy too, and it multiplies quickly.
|
| Now, on one-off hardware purchases and such, I agree it
| should be a lot easier. At least at the startup I work
| at, anything under $500 is just an expense report, so
| just make sure your manager is cool with it and go for
| it. But there are considerations here also around stuff
| coming in that IT or facilities then needs to support -
| obligating their time with your purchase is something you
| need to agree on or avoid.
|
| EDIT: Also as someone else pointed out, grift on purchase
| orders is easy without any oversight.
| 55555 wrote:
| Yeah, that's what we decided when figuring this out at
| our company. Everyone is spending thousands of dollars a
| month of the company's money (their time). We either
| trust them to spend our money wisely, or we don't (and
| they should work elsewhere). So we don't have all these
| policies. Having said that, these policies are a result
| of size. You wouldn't spend money poorly when the company
| is just you and four friends in a garage. But when you're
| big enough, hiring problematic people is absolutely going
| to happen and they just see the company's money as a free
| money pot. We're in a middle ground right now, but, as we
| grow, are finding it hard to avoid trending more towards
| the meme corporate policies.
| Macha wrote:
| Another example is if I want a $100 keyboard I need ahead
| of time VP sign off for the non-standard expense, if I
| want $10000/mo extra in AWS services I need any other
| engineer to approve my change
| JanisL wrote:
| A lot of it is path dependency whereby various practices
| turn into processes, regulations and laws. On top of this
| narratives form that guide peoples thinking as to what
| the right financial decisions are, then people can start
| to believe these narratives over time without questioning
| them. Eventually companies can create certain processes
| or habits on the basis that those narratives need to be
| true: https://www.epsilontheory.com/what-do-we-need-to-
| be-true/
| OJFord wrote:
| It's very impactful though, it'll probably be people seeing
| it as highly visible and career-advancing who manage to
| muster the 'patience and leverage'.
|
| If the org's been thoughtful to in advance, it's at the level
| of being almost an operational risk - all of engineering uses
| this tool, tool's licence or pricing might change, retooling
| has an associated cost and down-time.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Yes, yes they would. And they do. Regularly.
|
| When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see
| companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar.
| Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with
| the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on
| laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small
| SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower
| CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great,
| you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited
| to see you've saved $50,000/year.
|
| Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which
| probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as
| efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The
| budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some
| other category not to be touched.
|
| Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes
| "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset
| productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100
| developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this
| product. It's not in budget."
|
| Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO.
| $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira.
| $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira &
| Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo
| fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's
| not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR
| products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training
| (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of
| other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going
| to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds
| up _really_ fast when you multiply it out across all your
| Developers.
|
| And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container
| software costs more than your source code control solution? One
| of those two things you can very easily live without... and
| it's Docker.
| eitland wrote:
| You basically typed out what I feel.
|
| Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a
| name:
|
| "subscription fatigue"
|
| I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I
| ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for
| the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around.
|
| I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable
| provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a
| monthly or yearly fee.
|
| So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it.
|
| Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for
| IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we
| already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking
| out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old
| enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m
| devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to
| popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because
| going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld.
|
| Edit:
|
| > Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and
| goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000
| asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've
| got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on
| this product. It's not in budget."
|
| Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem.
|
| But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense
| against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere
| and then start jacking up the prices.
| roguecoder wrote:
| That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've
| heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a
| development tool.
|
| VCs are shooting themselves in the foot here: it is very
| obvious that we should never adopt any technical tool backed by
| VC, because they will eventually try to make us an offer we
| can't refuse and then go out of business shortly thereafter
| when their extortion attempt doesn't work.
| qeternity wrote:
| > That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've
| heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for
| a development tool.
|
| Lol yes, I know. My point was the cost of meatware is 3
| orders of magnitude greater than the software, and likely
| less at scale.
|
| $100k/mo would mean 5,000 devs. I highly doubt a company with
| overheads near/in excess of a billion dollars/year is going
| to sweat a $1m expense for core infra like Docker.
| stevebmark wrote:
| What companies are offering $250k/year for engineers?
| adolph wrote:
| TCO ain't paycheck offer
|
| Salary + Taxes (Payroll, etc) + Fringe (Healthcare, etc) +
| Dev licenses + Training/conferences = paycheck * (n > 1.5)
| cebert wrote:
| It seems like 200k+ is pretty typical for Engineers with at
| least some experience even in less hot markets like the
| Midwest. I know several developers in the Metro Detroit area
| making more than 200k base.
| hda111 wrote:
| In Germany this type of experience would be paid 50k. So
| the license fee will hit be costly here.
| hiram112 wrote:
| Are you talking about total compensation where you add base
| salary, payroll taxes paid by employer, health & benefits,
| 401K contribution, possible bonus & equity, etc?
|
| I see $160K salary ceilings for general "senior engineers"
| for vast majority of non-FAANG companies in high COL East
| Coast city, so I'd imagine midwest is $25K less since
| housing is so much cheaper.
|
| But maybe salaries are really exploding, and I just haven't
| been paying attention.
| yellowbkpk wrote:
| At least Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft.
| bazooka_penguin wrote:
| Pretty much any company operating in a major US city.
| ArchOversight wrote:
| When you add up salary + benefits + workplace amenities +
| taxes + software licenses and whatnot, you get there mighty
| quick.
| stevebmark wrote:
| I don't know what you mean by taxes, my question is about
| 250k base, excluding bonuses, stock, and excluding the
| supposed monetary value of benefits/training/travel/home
| office whatnot
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| The statement was that the engineer is a $250k asset to
| the company.
|
| Rule of thumb TCO for headcount is 1.5-2x salary to
| account for taxes, Medicare, health insurance, equipment
| cost, licenses, office square footage, stock options,
| travel, etc.
|
| So a $250k asset from a business perspective is typically
| someone that makes $125k-$165k.
| golover721 wrote:
| In the US, companies are responsible for paying 50% of
| the medicare and social security taxes for each of their
| employees.
| seneca wrote:
| A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about
| $250k/year for this license. Any half competent manager is
| going to realize that money would be better spend on a single
| engineer focused on tooling, who can replace Docker Desktop in
| addition to working on other efficiency improvements.
| qeternity wrote:
| > A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed
| about $250k/year for this license
|
| Would love to know how you arrived at this number.
|
| The list price for 100 engineers on the most expensive plan
| would be $25k/year and I guarantee Docker will do volume
| discounts.
|
| Additionally, the terms just say you need a paid plan, which
| presumably could be the cheapo $5/mo plan which would be
| $6k/year for 100 engineers.
| jpambrun wrote:
| I think you don't understand how big company procurement work.
| Getting legal's and procurement's attention to look at this is
| more effort than its worth. The logistics of managing licenses,
| single sign-on, etc is a nightmare. Besides, running docker is
| already frowned upon by InfoSec and require special permission.
| It will never happen where I work. Not because of money, but
| because it's too much trouble.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I guess it depends on the enterprise. I can imagine the
| thoughts of certain managers: Recurring costs? Something that
| used to be free and now they want money? Pricing per user? More
| expensive than Office 365?
| GordonS wrote:
| Have you ever worked at a large corporation?
|
| I have, and let me tell you, they will spend dozens of hours
| and thousands of dollars to fight a purchase of $21. I'm really
| not joking.
| gfiorav wrote:
| Exactly. This makes sense.
|
| USD 21 per user/month + bulk discount is nothing.
|
| If companies want to roll their own they can, but most won't.
| Docker Desktop adds a lot of value if only by removing the
| hassle for quick os-agnostic development.
| eptcyka wrote:
| What is the value add for Docker Desktop?
|
| In a world where podman exists, what's the point of docker on
| dev machines anyway?
| gfiorav wrote:
| The fact that you _could_ do something alternative doesn't
| mean it's easy, supported, or streamlined for developers or
| company tech ops.
|
| I don't think that thinking like an engineer will help you
| understand the value add here.
| trey-jones wrote:
| Well, I hadn't heard of podman until now, and I imagine I'm
| not the only one. Does it consistently have functional
| parity with docker?
| zerkten wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it has parity of functionality when
| Docker has grown to the point where it has name
| recognition with enterprises and a sales team that can
| engage with these large customers.
|
| It needs to have parity in all other pseudo-layers (3rd
| party tool support, support plans, OS support, someone to
| sign a contract with, compliance tools, etc.) We know
| most of these go unused or have no real meaning to devs,
| but they unlock enterprise procurement.
|
| I believe podman has a linkage to RedHat which may
| actually bring all of the things that procurement want to
| hear, but the question is whether the door is open to
| RedHat, or not. Procurement departments can be fickle,
| preferring Oracle for everything or the other way round
| trying to eradicate Oracle while permitting a combination
| of others. It's all politics based on previous
| experiences and opinions in the end.
| eric__cartman wrote:
| I use it on my Fedora dev machine and it's pretty good.
| Still wouldn't replace a mission critical machine with
| it, as it isn't the primary target for docker containers
| to run on and it can break more easily.
| hda111 wrote:
| It will break from time to time. But so does Docker
| Desktop. Neither Docker nor Podman are suitable for
| mission critical stuff. Their market is entirely dev
| machines and devs can fix in on their own.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Neither Docker nor Podman are suitable for mission
| critical stuff. Their market is entirely dev machines and
| devs can fix in on their own.
|
| Pretty sure they're used for more than that.
| eptcyka wrote:
| trey-jones, I apologize, but I cannot reply to you
| directly.
|
| The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs
| entirely in userspace on Linux. Having said that, I use
| it as a drop-in replacement for Docker and it's only
| become better in the past year. This is somewhat
| irrelevant to the Docker Desktop product, as podman
| doesn't provide a nice packaged up solution, but you can
| use podman on Windows and Mac as long as you have a Linux
| host available, either as a guest VM or as a machine
| _elsewhere_ on the network, see [1]. I only use Linux if
| I can, and the ability to run images without having to
| run a daemon with root privileges is a very big bonus for
| me, but it might not be for you. Now I do wonder, how
| hard would it be to declare a minimal nixOS VM for
| running as one's podman host :)
|
| [1]: https://podman.io/getting-started/installation.html
| rualca wrote:
| > The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs
| entirely in userspace on Linux.
|
| Why do you believe that? Docker's "root by default"
| design decision is the bane of Docker. Podman is even
| described as Docker done right in that regard.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs
| entirely in userspace on Linux.
|
| As I see it, that's the whole selling point. Need to have
| something with limited rights or build a container
| without root? Podman is the way to go.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I agree, what's missing is a nice VM appliance for macOS
| and Windows.
| Frost1x wrote:
| This is what singularity did in the HPC world (amongst
| other handy features):
|
| https://singularity.hpcng.org/
| rhatdan wrote:
| No true. Podman runs natively on a MAC, using a Linux VM
| for containers, just like Docker. `podman machine init`
| pulls down a VM, after which you can start running,
| developing, and building the same images that Docker and
| Kubernetes use.
|
| Just `brew install podman`.
|
| For Windows, Podman is available on many distributions in
| WSL2.
| theptip wrote:
| Docker for Mac includes a Kubernetes cluster that's way
| better than minikube etc.
|
| Not sure the bare docker daemon VM wrapper has a defensible
| moat though. Maybe this does more in Windows?
| andyroid wrote:
| How about the fact that not all, or even most, dev machines
| run Linux, which is the only platform podman supports?
| oplav wrote:
| I don't use podman, but a quick search shows that you can
| install podman on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Are you
| referring to something else?
|
| https://podman.io/getting-started/installation
| kristjansson wrote:
| > Podman is a tool for running Linux containers. You can
| do this from a MacOS desktop as long as you have access
| to a linux box either running inside of a VM on the host,
| or available via the network. You need to install the
| remote client and then setup ssh connection information.
|
| Literally the first non-title element in your link. Just
| because the client is cross-platform doesn't mean the
| entire solution is turn-key cross-platform.
| boudin wrote:
| That's exactly what docker desktop does as well. A Macos
| or Windows client that runs docker in a Linux VM. There
| is a really limited concept of container on Windows, but
| it's far from being great and since not much people use
| Windows in production to run apps, this is not really
| usefull.
| dralley wrote:
| If you read the instructions, they basically say that you
| still need a Linux VM or WSL environment to run Podman
| in. Which makes it not a complete replacement for Docker
| desktop, which handles the VM for you. So OP isn't wrong.
| Conan_Kudo wrote:
| Podman 3.3 and up has `podman machine`, which is supposed
| to do this for you...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| So that's a couple hours for the first dev to make a list
| of WSL setup instructions or a VM template, and 5 minutes
| each for every dev after.
| hiram112 wrote:
| Does Mac have any sort of built-in VM framework like
| Hyper-V?
|
| I did not know that running basic Linux VMs was something
| you could do without downloading VMware or Virtual Box -
| which isn't as easy as just running a few scripts
| (especially in corporate environments where Brew and
| other tools might not be so readily available to all
| employees).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I meant that for windows. I don't have enough experience
| with mac to give great answers.
|
| > downloading VMware or Virtual Box - which isn't as easy
| as just running a few scripts (especially in corporate
| environments where Brew and other tools might not be so
| readily available to all employees).
|
| Docker Desktop needs the same level of access, because it
| runs virtual machines. If you could install it on your
| own, can't you install those on your own? If it was
| centrally managed, then IT can switch to one of those
| programs instead.
|
| > Does Mac have any sort of built-in VM framework like
| Hyper-V?
|
| Yosemite added Hypervisor.framework, I guess?
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| The pricing model for this is really stupid. A $21/mo
| subscription is a pain in the ass -- they would be better off
| just selling it perpetual for $1000.
|
| I ran a big enterprise shop for years. Nuisance licensing like
| this costs a fortune - I'd need to go do legal review, have it
| tracked for renewals and compliance, etc. Freemium product like
| this is always coupled with a stupid license enforcement audit
| that appears and tries to extort you. For a small quantity,
| overhead may be more than the product.
|
| As an enterprise consumer, it makes me question the viability
| of the company. $250 a year is priced to allow unit managers to
| use P-Cards to avoid procurement processes. It's too cheap to
| make meaningful amounts of money, so unless it's a way to shift
| me to a more intelligent model, I'd have folks assigned to
| investigate alternatives.
| tempodox wrote:
| I love the term "nuisance licensing". Considering how
| everyone and their grandmother is switching to subscription
| models I wonder why it didn't come up earlier.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's not the amount of money that is the issue, the issue is
| that it this wasn't budgeted into the project when it was
| proposed 2 years ago. It is software that falls under category
| S which means you can't use overhead funds it has to be a
| category S purchase, but you have no category S funds budgeted
| to the project because you were using free software.
|
| Being so cheap actually complicates the matters even more,
| since the finance people don't really want to mess with
| purchases less than $5,000, even though it is their own rule
| that requires all software to go through them regardless of
| cost. It just means they won't be willing to help very much.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Which is why this shady tactic works time and again.
| ryandvm wrote:
| I think you're correct about existing users at large
| corporations. Converting all those into paid accounts is a no-
| brainer.
|
| However, this will have a massive change on the competitive
| landscape. For companies that haven't yet adopted Docker, this
| is a huge red checkmark. This change is going to spur
| development on open source alternatives like nothing else
| could.
| qeternity wrote:
| Nah. We're not 250 people. We use docker, and we won't
| stop/switch because of it.
|
| This is such a good problem to have. I would love to cut
| Docker Inc. a check.
|
| And we've basically moved over to garden (a k8s dev env)
| anyway. But we still use docker plenty.
| dgellow wrote:
| That's surprisingly cheap
| BCM43 wrote:
| Since they've buried it a little:
|
| "Specifically, small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND
| less than $10 million in revenue) may continue to use Docker
| Desktop with Docker Personal for free. The use of Docker Desktop
| in large businesses, however, requires a Pro, Team, or Business
| paid subscription, starting at $5 per user per month."
| dang wrote:
| This comment was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28368997, so it's quoting
| the press release, not the current article. We've since merged
| the threads.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Anyone know how they plan to enforce this? Audits into the IP
| space connecting to hub.docker.com? Maybe arbitrary device OS
| detection a la (nmap -O $local_subnet | grep
| -ci 'Macbook') > 250
| qeternity wrote:
| They won't need to. The number of 250+ engineer businesses
| that would risk running unlicensed software is small.
| merb wrote:
| well it is AND: "AND less than $10 million in revenue"
|
| basically most companies with ~50 people probably has 10
| million in revenue (annually). considering wages and
| buildings and stuff you need for 50 people...
| cutemonster wrote:
| (In the US, not in developing countries)
| academia_hack wrote:
| I don't think it's 250 seats, but 250 employees. Lots of
| fairly low tech businesses (such as restaurant or retail
| chain or universities) may have less than a dozen docker
| users but still cross that total threshold.
| qeternity wrote:
| Well, that makes it even cheaper.
| hbn wrote:
| Maybe this is common knowledge, but I saw an ad recently
| for a company that offers money to snitch on your employer
| for using unlicensed software, or not paying for free-for-
| personal-use" software
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Businesses that would knowingly risk this? Small.
|
| Businesses that would unknowingly risk this because some
| engineer just went and installed Docker Desktop because
| they couldn't be bothered chasing this through management
| and procurement? Well..
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I don't get it. There still seems to be a free version, which
| includes bundled docker engine, right? I think this is the only
| part of docker desktop that most devs need. Private repos were
| always a paid feature AFAIK.
|
| The concerning text written is "Limited image pulls per day".
| What's the limit here?
| [deleted]
| throwawayy293 wrote:
| I personally support Docker Desktop for Mac for an organization
| of 250-300 engineers.
|
| I have been supporting it for 2 years now. Been through all the
| Docker Desktop upgrades, performance issues everytthing. I have
| researched docker performance on macs running k3d + k3s + istio
| and a bunch of microservices. I have had to jump into the
| internals of Docker daemon and docker cli and networking to solve
| how docker networks are provisioned for various proxying issues.
|
| 1. Docker dragged their feet with native performance for file
| syncing. We have to selectively enable it and just so that it
| doesn't bog the machine down.
|
| 2. When running it gets the CPU running at 75-80C, causing the
| fan to run non-stop at 3000 rpm at least. It is definitely impact
| by bad macbook pro design, which is terrible at airflow and heat
| sink activities
|
| 3. We were on unstable for a bit to test the new file syncing
| approach. Docker dropped that in stable and said "deal with it"
|
| 4. The paid forced upgrade notification means that I can't peg
| the Docker Desktop version for the whole org at a certain
| version.
|
| 5. Right after we switch from the unstable to stable, the next
| minor version is a breaking change.
|
| 6. Number 4 would be fine it docker would keep to their guarantee
| of stable being stable. They do a terrible job of being backwards
| compatible. The current stable we had was 3.3.1. With the
| constant minor upgrades, and pushing people, some people went to
| 3.6.0. (the latest as of yesterday, Aug 30) This broke everything
| inexplicable with just a VM error where k3d would keep crashing.
| I downgraded everyone back to 3.3.1 to get teams unblocked while
| waiting for me to find a fix.
|
| 7. Finding a fix usually involves waiting for Docker to
| prioritize something but at this point I don't trust that Docker
| know what it is doing.
|
| I am currently pushing for Linux laptops, hosted dev environments
| and reducing the need to run distributed monoliths. We shall see.
| stonecharioteer wrote:
| I hope you do get the Linux Laptops through. I just joined s
| company that made an exception for me to use Linux and I
| haven't felt more valued ever. I never want to use another OS
| again.
| alanwreath wrote:
| " the Docker Desktop updated terms only apply to Mac and Windows
| "
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| Mirantis needs to pay the bills
| dpratt wrote:
| This appears to be cutting of their nose to spite their face. We
| have a team of 50+ engineers that all use Docker for Mac for
| daily development tasks, but I suspect that will no longer be
| true in a rather short amount of time. Frankly, I don't really
| know if anybody actually uses the UI components for it outside of
| starting and stopping the engine and for basic configuration of
| the VM. Everything else that comes with it is just useless cruft
| for our use cases.
|
| As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I'd be happy to
| contribute to the effort), I'll be moving away from Docker for
| Mac.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > As soon as there is a viable alternative (and I'd be happy to
| contribute to the effort), I'll be moving away from Docker for
| Mac.
|
| I just SSH into my server. The biggest pain about macOS is that
| it can't easily mount SFTP.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I've been doing development in docker, but unrelated to that
| I did an upgrade to big sur and borked the machine for a few
| days.
|
| Pulling the same projects to my (admittedly quite fast) linux
| box in the cloud is night and day for speed in docker with
| volume mounts. Browserfy runs 5x faster, at least. Yarn
| install is 10x faster.
|
| And it's reliable. Docker's filesharing on the mac has about
| a 25% failure rate that any given save will be properly
| picked up by watch, with a complete, uncorrupted, updated
| file.
| vhodges wrote:
| Fuse/sshfs exists for OSX. Seems to work okay the little I
| played with it.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| I used fuse/sshfs quite a lot in the past, and never had
| much issues (I think most of my issues were with how my
| editor displayed and refreshed the file list, not with the
| actual sshfs implementation, and were similar to those on
| Linux/Windows.)
| smoldesu wrote:
| Ouch, really? Cyberduck was always one of my first installs
| simply due to how much I spited Finder, but I didn't know
| things were... that bad.
| mockingbirdy wrote:
| You can mount SFTP with Mountain Duck [1], from the creators
| of Cyberduck. Costs around $40.
|
| [1]: https://mountainduck.io
| rcarmo wrote:
| For the Mac, just get Canonical's Multipass
| (http://multipass.run) and do an apt-get to install Docker into
| a VM and use VS Code to "remote" to it. It will automatically
| install the Docker extension inside the Linux VM and you're
| set.
|
| For Windows, use WSL2 and do the same.
|
| Both can mount "local" folders, although the setup is obviously
| different.
|
| You now have a better way to manage containers than ever
| before.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Why run Docker inside a VM on a Mac, when you can just run
| the Linux dev environment directly inside the VM? That's just
| starting to sound like Docker for the sake of Docker.
|
| Multipass, Qemu, and Parallels can all provide a solid VM on
| Mac host. All you need after that is your dev environment VM
| guest image to deploy to the team.
|
| https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/Mac
|
| https://www.parallels.com/
| osdril wrote:
| On Apple Silicon Multipass actually uses QEMU under the
| hood. Basically it's just a (very convenient) wrapper
| rcarmo wrote:
| Because you can map your working folder inside it on both
| Multipass and WSL2, and you can get an integrated editor
| experience with VS Code, which is what many people
| apparently want to do (I'm a tmux guy so I don't care, but
| I thought I'd provide a user-friendly approach).
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Some people here actually want and need Docker features.
| For me it's the ability to run from a given image and know
| that I've got _exactly_ the same image that other
| developers have. Reproducibility.
| techthumb wrote:
| When I want a very specific version if the image, I use
| the SHA to pull/run $ docker pull hello-w
| orld@sha256:7d91b69e04a9029b99f3585aaaccae2baa80bcf318f4a
| 5d2165a9898cd2dc0a1
| _joel wrote:
| Or you could tag a little more optimally.
| rileymichael wrote:
| Tags are mutable, digests aren't.
| _joel wrote:
| Why, how often do you change tags after you've built a
| container and for what reason if so?
| jonjonsonjr wrote:
| Digests cryptographically guarantee that you get the
| correct content, which prevents both malicious tampering
| (mitm, stolen credentials, etc) or accidental mutations.
| This is why "immutable tags" are a bad substitute and an
| oxymoron.
|
| There are also better caching properties when using
| content addressable identifiers. For example with
| kubernetes pull policies, using IfNotPresent and
| deploying by digest means you don't even have to check
| with the registry to initialize a pod if the image is
| already cached, which can improve startup latency.
| knicknic wrote:
| With a sha you shouldn't have to change the pull policy.
| However there isn't a need for always if you have the
| sha.
| darkwater wrote:
| > There are also better caching properties when using
| content addressable identifiers. For example with
| kubernetes pull policies, using IfNotPresent and
| deploying by digest means you don't even have to check
| with the registry to initialize a pod if the image is
| already cached, which can improve startup latency.
|
| While agree on the unquoted part, this is true also for
| human-readable (aka mutable-that-should-be-immutable)
| tags, when that pull policy is set (which is by default
| for everything that is not `latest`)
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I might be wrong, but I think his point is that by the
| time you're running a linux VM for docker, why not go
| ahead and get the rest of the tooling for free?
|
| Docker can still be run in the VM just fine, for cases
| where you want a reproducible build environment.
|
| I do this at any company that lets me (and by lets, I
| mean doesn't explicitly forbid) - They all give me a Mac,
| and the first (and sometimes only) thing I install is
| usually vmware fusion, followed by the linux distro of my
| choice (Arch).
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> for cases where you want a reproducible build
| environment._
|
| Or just create your reproducible build environment as a
| QEMU VM image instead of a docker file. That way you only
| have to install a VM image, instead of install VM
| image/OS + install Docker + install your Docker file.
| sneak wrote:
| Because the end result of a lot of workflows (eg k8s) is a
| buildable dockerfile, or built docker image for deployment.
| discordance wrote:
| I want to ship a dockerfile in my CI/CD pipeline, not a VM
| image
| nklmilojevic wrote:
| Doesn't work on M1 chips yet.
| osdril wrote:
| It's in "beta" right now but it works quite well (you can
| find the binary in the dedicated GitHub issue). Under the
| hood it just uses QEMU which in turn uses Apple's
| Hypervisor.framework for virtualization
| johnnypangs wrote:
| I believe this is the issue referenced above:
| https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1857
| alanwreath wrote:
| Can't say that limiting developers to VSCode is necessarily a
| step forward.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, it does set up everything automagically for you. I
| can also dig around for my Docker CLI config and the right
| way to expose the Docker TCP socket to the host, but if you
| need a quick way to get working, VS Code is it.
| mbreese wrote:
| You don't need VSCode specifically, but it does provide an
| alternative GUI for managing Docker containers that isn't
| tied directly to Docker Desktop.
|
| You could use anything to manage the Docker VM... VSCode is
| just one option.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Why don't you just use the VM directly?
| rcarmo wrote:
| Folder mapping, which both options provide.
| hda111 wrote:
| This is the best solution. Multipass is also great software.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Do you mean APT via
| https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/, correct?
| rcarmo wrote:
| No, you can apt-get docker.io (the repackaged version
| available for the last 2-3 LTS releases, built from source
| and with fan networking support). Works for 99.9% of your
| use cases.
| [deleted]
| boublepop wrote:
| Personally I think just running portainer as a container is a
| viable alternative to docket desktop. But I never really used
| the UI much, so perhaps there are features I don't know of.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Unless there's podman or similar for local dev, you'd still
| need Docker Desktop to use it on Windows/MacOS.
| [deleted]
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > (and I'd be happy to contribute to the effort)
|
| Isn't paying their fee also contributing to the effort of what
| they've put in to it so far, and ideally what they'll do to
| keep it working and improve over time?
| make3 wrote:
| 21$/month/user is nothing for the business setting.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Between getting that approved and paid by the company or just
| using another tool, I will use another tool.
| zapita wrote:
| You're going to spend scarce engineering resources
| reimplementing a Docker for Mac alternative, then roll out your
| immature alternative to 50+ engineers, instead of paying a few
| hundred dollars a month for a good product and moving on?
|
| It seems to me you would be the one cutting off your nose to
| spite your face in this scenario.
| coding123 wrote:
| The reason this move isn't popular is because it seemed like
| local docker development (for any size corporation) was
| always going to be free. If I personally had known this was
| in the cards I would have invested (time, money and effort)
| into alternatives earlier on. Instead they killed all the
| competition and are now demanding money. So yeah, this is the
| first move by Docker that has made me kind of mad at the
| company.
|
| How does this affect consultants that want to introduce
| docker to large corporations but small teams? A lot of
| scenarios become crappy now.
| dralley wrote:
| > Instead they killed all the competition and are now
| demanding money. So yeah, this is the first move by Docker
| that has made me kind of mad at the company.
|
| Which alternatives did they kill? The Podman tool ecosystem
| is doing fine and is closing in on being a complete
| replacement, and Docker Swarm hasn't exactly killed
| k{number}s.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| "k{number}s" means k8s, right? Is this a reference or
| something?
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Assuming that you currently don't need any other than the
| functionality the free plan provides, and assuming all 50
| engineers need a license, your ,,a few hundred dollars" is
| actually $1'250/month just for getting the same as before.
|
| I understand (in some way) the decision Docker made but I am
| not sure it is the way-to-go. However, it is a very hard
| question and if I had to pay a monthly fee for each component
| I'm using to develop a solution, one or the other project
| would not even start because it's not worth it anymore.
| yarcob wrote:
| That 50 people team probably costs at least 250000/month.
| Are you going to take away a tool that everyone on the team
| needs to save 1250?
|
| Or put another way, how much time would you need to
| replicate what Docker offers for a team of 50 people? If it
| takes more than 25% of the time of a single employee, then
| Docker is cheaper (assuming your employee costs $5000 a
| month, which I guess is a lower bound for an engineer).
| chrisandchris wrote:
| No, I am not (that was also not my point basically). My
| point is that you are going to pay for a) something you
| got for free (as in beer) before and b) something you
| don't (maybe) need/want.
|
| I think it is a very valid question how to monetize
| Docker (and all the other libraries we are using for
| free), but I am personally not sure that subscriptions to
| everything are the solution.
|
| I am sure that this expense should not get into your way
| if you have 50+ engineers, however if you think that with
| all expenses...
| dgellow wrote:
| So you have a tool that your team use daily, but won't pay a
| small license for it? I'm not sure I understand that logic. If
| the tool you have worked for you when it was free, it still
| works for you when you pay a small cost per month. Unless the
| cost is really that huge, I don't see why that would be a
| reason to change.
| yaitsyaboi wrote:
| Not only is he opposed to paying a license fee, he will
| contribute to the development of an entirely new, almost
| certainly worse, tool.
| ash_while wrote:
| I made https://github.com/lime-green/remote-docker-aws a while
| ago and I've been happily using it for about a year. It throws
| docker in a ec2 VM and allows you to call docker as if it were
| running locally by tunneling and syncing files. The network
| file systems I tried (sshfs, nfs) were way too slow when used
| as docker volumes so it uses a tool called unison which does
| two-way file syncing (rsync only does one way, which is a
| problem for something like making django migrations)
| gigatexal wrote:
| I tried getting podman working pointing at a Linux server and
| ram into issues as an alternative to Docker. I'm hoping the
| kinks get worked out and I can move over.
| SilverRed wrote:
| We have been using podman here for all of our developers and
| have yet to find anything different to docker. Perhaps you
| are using a more obscure feature.
| hda111 wrote:
| I think podman is a lot easier than docker. You can stop
| all containers easily (without xargs)
|
| podman stop -a
|
| or you can mount the current directory
|
| podman run -v .:/mnt
|
| or you can mount while you build
|
| podman build -v /dir:/dir
| lanevorockz wrote:
| RIP
| babaganoosh89 wrote:
| So using the CLI is still free on Mac, just not the gui desktop
| app?
| athorax wrote:
| I believe "docker desktop" on mac includes all the various
| plumbing to get the docker cli working transparently (vs.
| running docker yourself in a VM)
| [deleted]
| cybrexalpha wrote:
| This seems like a bit of a footgun from Docker Inc. Those on
| Linux will just run Docker Engine (the open source part)
| directly, or move to alternatives like Podman. Docker Desktop
| only really has value on macOS and Windows, and there it's only
| because nobody wants to manage the glue to setup a Linux VM.
| Given the cost, I suspect many will chose to do that glue work
| themselves and I wouldn't be surprised to see an open source
| project spring up to do that.
|
| Everything else is handled by other parts of the ecosystem
| already, image registries both private and public, orchestration,
| etc.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| macOS is the hard one to solve. It does a lot of magic things
| in the background and Docker even created their own "distro" /
| VM build system, linuxkit, that went on to be useful in a lot
| of other places to make it work.
|
| A lot of macOS developers imo seem to have more knowledge in
| their specific domain and less in how to wire up a VM to look
| seamless, they'll need the docker CLI to work with the local
| filesystem to keep a lot of existing Makefiles functional, I
| see a bunch of companies caughing up money in the short term
| just for that.
|
| Docker Desktop on Windows itself proves quite well that WSL2
| works fine for this use case.
| qeternity wrote:
| It's not the users who will be paying for it. Enterprises will
| bend over and take this 100%
|
| Good move by Docker, financially speaking. They have little to
| lose.
| coding123 wrote:
| It's a short sited move that will kill D.Desktop. It's not
| that these large corps don't have the money for this, it's
| how money is allocated in companies. Instead, now all hobby
| projects in large corp get killed fast and early because the
| hobbyist knows their project is doomed if the company isn't
| going to go for a new bill.
|
| A whole bunch of scenarios die now.
| seoaeu wrote:
| ...if a company is incapable of allocating money to pay
| Docker, then why should Docker care whether that company
| uses the product or not?
| cshokie wrote:
| I agree that it seems self-destructive. I use Docker
| Desktop at work for a one-off side project that I run
| manually every once in a while. Using a container for it
| helps keep things maintainable compared to a full VM that
| needs full maintenance. If I have to get formal approval
| and a purchase to continue using it then the most likely
| outcome is this side project stops completely. And with it
| my excuse to gain professional experience using Docker.
| dhagz wrote:
| Honestly, I don't see a reason to keep Docker for Mac installed
| on my computer. I haven't run a container workload locally in I
| don't know how long and I haven't built a container locally in
| even longer. It's just taking up space on my laptop and bugging
| me to update what seems like constantly.
| duped wrote:
| The hype/buzzword driven development surrounding micro
| services/containerization has hit middle America and
| enterprises spend dumb amounts of money on related projects. I
| can see them spending more money on Docker Desktop with no
| difficulty, because the incentive is not to save money.
| remram wrote:
| There is a Docker Desktop for Linux? What does it do?
|
| Why would I go out of my way to set up Docker differently on my
| dev machine compared to my servers? That seems like a recipe
| for failure.
| SilverRed wrote:
| On MacOS and windows, using docker is a pain because you have
| to run a linux VM and set up networking and everything.
| simiones wrote:
| Nope, there isn't (at this time, at least).
| detaro wrote:
| front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28368997
| dang wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Although that thread was posted earlier, I think we'll merge it
| into this one, on the principle that corporate press releases
| tend to make worse HN submissions. This is something of an
| exception to HN's original source rule.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| zenlf wrote:
| On the one hand, I'm sad that I probably have to uninstall docker
| desktop because I only use it for small side projects, on the
| other I understand Docker Inc's need to monetize as a for profit
| company.
|
| I do have a genuine question though. Can a company just change
| their pricing structure and make it effective immediately(I
| understand they have a grace period here)? I guess for free tiers
| they probably can, because the users have never paid them, but
| what if I'm a paying customer? Could Docker simply say sorry we
| have changed our pricing from next billing cycle(or tomorrow) you
| have to pay 100% more. Could they legally do something like that?
| xiaodai wrote:
| right move
| sgt wrote:
| "or higher than $10m in annual revenue" .. that isn't necessary a
| large company. And it says nothing of profit.
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