[HN Gopher] We're No Longer Sunsetting the Free Team Plan
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We're No Longer Sunsetting the Free Team Plan
Author : 2bluesc
Score : 185 points
Date : 2023-03-24 21:26 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.docker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.docker.com)
| gosukiwi wrote:
| ... for now.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'm curious, are they profitable? Docker is a super popular tool
| and I thought whoever has been there from the beginning should
| have 7 digits in their accounts.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Their ARR is over 50M, and they have raised $400M+ over the
| years. I wonder how much of that they have burnt.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| My applause to Alex Ellis for writing a clear, direct call to
| arms!
|
| Their work is super useful and interesting. I've added them to my
| list of sponsorships: https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis
| hughw wrote:
| Well, thank you, Docker.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Sounds desperate. Maybe a large chunk of users left in the last
| few days.
| nrclark wrote:
| Docker, Inc. is in a tricky position. They've raised a lot of
| capital, and continue to raise capital. According to Wikipedia,
| they took $105 million from Bain Capital in November of last
| year. So Docker, Inc has Mirantis on one side, and a whole bunch
| of VC on the other side.
|
| I'm sure that Docker Hub is expensive to run, and the core Docker
| app isn't free to maintain either.
|
| This TOS change was a fiasco, and absolutely didn't succeed in
| doing anything other than losing a lot of community goodwill. But
| I do understand why they're trying to squeeze some money out of
| Docker Hub. I'd be surprised if it's even break-even for them
| right now, and VC funds aren't exactly known for their acts of
| charity.
| GordonS wrote:
| I get what you are saying, but I gave little sympathy for their
| situation - they used the VC tactic of "give it away to gain
| and monopolise the market, then do the old switcheroo once
| we're #1", so they had to know what was coming.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| I wonder how Docker survives after this, this action now rolled
| back was clearly a cost cutting exercise. Im still surprised
| Google hasnt acquired them.
| codeptualize wrote:
| You can not be the main player and betray the trust of your users
| (free or not).
|
| It's easy to forget the value of being an important part of a
| community that makes decisions on millions of $$$ in software
| spending, but be sure that there are plenty of companies who
| would love to take your place.
|
| Reverting this incredibly dumb decision is the right course of
| action but there is a long way ahead to restore trust.
| mnau wrote:
| I get that images costs money to host, but they could instead add
| a new feature that would spread out the costs (~bittorrent),
| while the hub would be the seed of last resort.
|
| VC capital wants its money back I guess.
| tommica wrote:
| I hope the team can figure out how to monetize their stuff and
| keep rolling forward - their tech is amazing!
| iamleppert wrote:
| They didn't know their place, and still don't -- clearly.
| Dockerhub has very little to offer (basically hanging on by a
| thread) and doesn't deliver enough value to justify an expense
| for what was always claimed to be a free service. If you give
| something away for free, it better be just a starting point, for
| you to figure out how you're going to add enough value to justify
| people paying you. And then -- make your case and tell them why.
|
| Docker didn't do any of this. They literally tried to take a free
| product and just start charging for it. It feels the same as a
| restaurant who gave free toothpicks away suddenly want to start
| charging for them. This speaks to how out of touch their senior
| leadership is, and the only possible thing they can do to recover
| is to part ways with the leaders who made that terrible business
| decision.
|
| I've been in meetings like this before -- some analyst runs a SQL
| query and makes the case for charging for something that has
| always been free, and hamstrung leadership goes along with it
| because it sounds like such an easy way to "unlock value". What
| they really mean, is, easy way to make money off unsuspecting
| people via something that should probably be illegal, and would
| be in a different context (i.e. bait and switch).
| AviationAtom wrote:
| Yep, the path to monetization is always adding new value-adds,
| not trying to charge for the current functionality after the
| fact.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| Who still use Docker, and not just the tool?
| wildmXranat wrote:
| Well. So what's the plan then? If they were doing this to create
| more revenue and limit spend, then will they be trouble down the
| line?
| genmud wrote:
| Read: We won't do it today or next week, since we got a bunch of
| negative publicity, but don't actually address why they didn't
| catch that it was a terrible policy.
|
| They describe that they have come to the light and now realize
| the policy was bad, as well as the communication around it, but
| don't describe how they are actually going to address this
| fundamental misalignment with their userbase and out-of touch
| decision making.
| twblalock wrote:
| It's incredibly tiresome that the first post on HN whenever a
| company does a press release is going to be from someone who
| will never be happy no matter what was said.
|
| "What does take responsibility mean?" "This is just PR fluff".
| "They are just saving face." Criticism of good things because
| the poster didn't like the motivation. Stuff like that.
|
| Did you really think the company was going to bare their soul
| to you like you were their psychiatrist or their priest? Do you
| think you are even entitled to that?
|
| Commenting about whether or not this is a good decision is
| valuable. Complaining about the content of PR fluff is not.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| The original announcement was such that no followup would
| make people happy. It's not fair that you can mess up badly
| enough that even with perfect play, total recovery is not
| possible. Life is not fair.
| icelancer wrote:
| Same with layoffs and everything else.
|
| The CEO could take a 100% paycut, relinquish all of his
| shares, take 20 lashes on the back, and fire himself yet the
| top comments will always be about "oh so this is taking
| responsibility huh, how about not screwing it up in the first
| place???"
|
| It's a tired act.
| genmud wrote:
| These decisions should never have seen the light of day, let
| alone a policy that was communicated in the way they did.
|
| Why should we cheer on PR and product folks trying to break
| their fucking arms patting themselves on the back for walking
| back an incredibly disruptive, short sighted and user-hostile
| decision?
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Because A) of all the permutations of follow up decisions
| that could have been made, this falls on the "good choice"
| side, and B) this isn't "pat on the back" situation, this
| is a save face situation.
| user3939382 wrote:
| We have been conditioned to think it's acceptable, because
| it's now normal, to live in a society where we're constantly
| deceived and lied to. Everything is marketing, PR, spin.
|
| From all the corporations that control so much of our lives,
| the government, science, medicine, religion. Every major
| institution in our society. Every message has to be carefully
| parsed and squinted at, one always has to deduce what might
| have been the (truthful, real, honest) conversation behind
| closed doors that produced what we're hearing or reading.
|
| From every message it is possible to know only one thing:
| what the author wants us to think. What is real is almost
| always another story.
|
| _That_ is tiresome.
|
| Related clip from Crazy People
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzyNPoI17rE
| twblalock wrote:
| PR exists because honesty and frankness are punished in our
| society and people will jump at any opportunity to
| prosecute or sue. The result is PR fluff, endless
| disclaimers, and announcements with as little detail of the
| internal workings of a decision as possible which need to
| pass through review by legal and finance teams.
|
| But we all know that, right? We don't need to pretend like
| we don't, or act offended by it, as if it's the first press
| release we've ever seen.
| fwlr wrote:
| It's no more or less tiresome than a press release is itself.
| Whatever the material contents, a press release has
| "positivity" set to 1.0 (or as close to 1.0 as permitted by
| law and professional standards). This upsets the balance of
| the world, and that balance can be restored by submitting a
| reply with "positivity" set to 0.0 (or as close to 0.0 as
| permitted by law and standards of etiquette).
|
| Analogous to "someone who will never be happy no matter what
| was said", the tone of the press release will always be happy
| no matter what they have to say.
|
| It seems very natural - almost inevitable, even - that
| someone will reply to an artificially max-positive document
| with an artificially max-negative comment.
|
| (Personally, I made peace with the tiresome nature of both
| press releases and critical replies by viewing it as an
| informal application of Laplace's Rule - add one success and
| one failure to the total count to more accurately estimate
| the real underlying probability. The press release presents
| one observation guaranteed to be as positive as possible, and
| the inevitable critical reply presents another observation
| guaranteed to be as negative as possible, so with those two
| in hand you can look at other observations and get a better
| final estimation.)
| twblalock wrote:
| The press release also contains actual information that is
| relevant -- in this case, that free teams is not being
| sunset.
|
| The reflexive complaints about press releases don't have
| that value.
| genmud wrote:
| Without making any commitments that they won't at some
| point in the future undo that decision, that they see the
| importance of why there are free accounts, or what they
| are doing to ensure that community feedback is
| incorporated into their plans _before_ they make
| decisions.
|
| Sure, they changed course on this single decision, but
| they haven't addressed the situation that allowed this to
| even take place, nor does it look like they are planning
| on it.
| fwlr wrote:
| (I edited my comment as you were replying, sorry about
| that.)
|
| If the reflexive maximally-negative complaints are
| contradicting the actual information presented, they had
| better come with strong evidence or I'm dismissing them
| (and I do find _those_ comments more tiresome than press
| releases or the other negative replies; they come across
| as conspiratorial crank-cases with an axe to grind, even
| bordering on spam to my mind).
|
| The comments I had in mind are "the most negative
| interpretation of the information that comports with the
| facts", much like the non-information components of the
| press release are the most positive interpretation of the
| information that comports with the facts.
|
| A press release contains info and fluff. The opposite of
| soft fluff is hard edges, so perhaps a cute and pithy
| summary of my view is that no fluffy PR statement is
| complete without an edgy reply.
| rlpb wrote:
| > Analogous to "someone who will never be happy no matter
| what was said", the tone of the press release will always
| be happy no matter what they have to say.
|
| So grow your own filter. But as another reply said, this
| press release still has valuable information remaining
| after having been filtered. Complaints about their press
| release reading like a press release do not.
| fwlr wrote:
| >So grow your own filter
|
| I did! I combine the fluff of the PR with the edge of the
| negative reply and they cancel out, leaving me free to
| analyze the info that remains.
| mikercampbell wrote:
| All this being said, this was actually a pretty
| insightful conversation for me, not having considered the
| complexity around press releases like this, but still
| being uneasy about them but not sure why.
| caturopath wrote:
| You have to take the W sometimes.
| genmud wrote:
| If they don't change the way they make decisions, its only a
| slight delay... not a Win.
|
| A win would be a commitment to never do this again (ideally),
| or put in something that binds them to provide <x> amount of
| notice.
| Osiris wrote:
| No company will ever say they will never do something in
| the future like that because the future is unknowable and
| who knows what circumstances will come up.
|
| What we can hope for is they learned something from this so
| when a hard decision like this must be made they'll use a
| different approach.
| Kalium wrote:
| Is this really a W? It seems more like a stay of execution.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Stay of execution is a W. We all due someday.
| dymk wrote:
| Negative generic FUD
| Quekid5 wrote:
| At least we know that we're on borrowed time and maybe the
| wider ecosystem can come up with a decent (distributed, even?)
| alternative instead of everybody panicking and just moving
| toward another rug-pull.
| rc_mob wrote:
| Yup. Its still happening even if delayed a year or two and
| obfuscated by some complications.
| wefarrell wrote:
| Yup, this should be addressed with the same level of detail and
| transparency as a postmortem for a technical failure.
|
| What were the multiple points of failure that led to this
| decision and how are they altering their operations from
| preventing something like this from happening again?
|
| Without deep transparency they will lose trust.
| fariszr wrote:
| Too late for me personally.
|
| Already deleted accounts of my projects and switched to
| GHCR/Quay.io with a custom domain redirect [1] to avoid this
| happening again.
|
| GitHub is really living up to its reputation of being the open
| source hub.
|
| 1. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/docker-image-registry-facade/
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Just remember who owns Github. EEE.
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| They might start charging for it but heck Microsoft still
| supports running VB6 applications on modern Windows.
|
| Not a fanboy by any measure but killing projects and products
| left, right, and centre isn't something they usually do.
| benatkin wrote:
| Yes, but what about VB6 itself?
|
| "Where can I install/buy Visual Basic 6?"
| https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-
| US/49c35ab...
| verdverm wrote:
| They recently killed off their AR/XR teams which were
| really good tbh, made me sad...
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Whole point is that Dockerhub dared to ask for money
| instead of hosting your stuff for free and paying for the
| bandwidth.
|
| The reason why Github is free for normal users it that
| Microsoft extracts value out of the code you host there, by
| at least training their LLM. Same will apply for your
| docker containers.
|
| This is part of the Embracing open source.
|
| Now they have already started selling Copilot and with
| CopilotX bringing new AI assisted stuff to code reviews and
| pull requests even more people will migrate over.
|
| This is part of the Extending.
|
| Then after they have everyone they can get to use Github
| and they have extracted all value from your code they will
| move to the last step and ask you to pay for hosting your
| stuff and while git is free to use and you can setup your
| own servers the general UX will be so much better that even
| hobbyist will pay.
|
| This is the Extinguishing
| benatkin wrote:
| Or they could make it so if someone pays $30/mo they can
| get a notification every time someone visits their
| GitHub. This is a reality for LinkedIn which is also
| owned by Microsoft.
|
| Don't let Microsoft ever get away with saying they
| respect privacy...
| twblalock wrote:
| The company with the best track record of maintaining
| backwards compatibility in the entire tech industry owns
| Github. I'm not worried about that.
| eyegor wrote:
| However, their websites have not held to their software
| standards. Links break all the time in my experience,
| especially for older documentation (msdn, etc).
| benatkin wrote:
| If I can't afford a license, I don't have backwards
| compatibility, TYVM
| koito17 wrote:
| >The company with the best track record of maintaining
| backwards compatibility in the entire tech industry owns
| Github.
|
| They also own TS, which seems to have major breaking
| changes each year and necessitate annual churn and
| refactoring of entire codebases. Windows having remarkable
| backwards compatibility does not mean the rest of their
| products do, too.
|
| EDIT: I could also bring up one of their other products,
| Lean, whose 4.x versions have so much breakage that mathlib
| has been on a community-maintained fork of Lean 3 for as
| long as I can remember.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| What does TS stand for?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| TypeScript.
| mrkeen wrote:
| My formative experience of their backwards compatibility
| was being unable to open old word docs in newer versions of
| word. Open office could. Go figure.
|
| As for how long their tech lasts, I used XNA for a game jam
| in 2012, and had an alright experience. I could no longer
| download and use XNA by the time the 2013 game jam came
| around.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _My formative experience of their backwards
| compatibility was being unable to open old word docs in
| newer versions of word._
|
| From experience: Word's still dropping support for older
| documents, and LibreOffice still supports them. (The only
| LO incompatibility I know is missing Math formulae
| sometimes, and that might have been fixed; if not, it's a
| fairly straightforward code change, since OOXML Math tags
| contain textboxes.)
| eikenberry wrote:
| Just out of curiosity why do you think being good at
| backwards compatibility of your software impacts business
| decisions around a SAAS?
| Osiris wrote:
| For me it's because they are very careful not to screw
| over customers that rely on certain behavior.
|
| Having said that, Microsoft does sometimes break
| backwards compatibility.
|
| I sell a Windows app (a battery meter) that cannot work
| on Windows 11 because the new Taskbar doesn't expose an
| interface for plugins to render data on the taskbar
| (IDeskBand is the old interface).
|
| So I can display a small window to the user but it's far
| less convenient that showing it persistently in the
| taskbar.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Can you use the old-fashioned way, and repeatedly update
| the tray icon?
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I dont get this argument. Docker didnt break backwards
| compatibility. They literally just wanted big projects to
| pay for the storage and bandwidth they were using.
| Karunamon wrote:
| If all they wanted was the whales to pay up, why did they
| not target the big projects, using some objective metric
| like pull count our actual bandwidth consumption rather
| than literally everybody? Team projects are often used
| for namespacing reasons and teams of one are not
| uncommon.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I think you missed part of that..
|
| > [..] with a custom domain redirect [1] to avoid this
| happening again.
| fariszr wrote:
| That's why I did setup the custom link redirect, i can easily
| migrate at any time!
| onedr0p wrote:
| I still refuse to use Dockerhub and I cannot wait for Podman (and
| building multiarch containers) on Mac to get better so I can
| absolutely ditch anything Docker Inc or anything Mirantis touches
| all together. These are two companies I will NEVER trust again
| and will use whatever power I have to convince others to do the
| same.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| Are Red Hat / IBM better?
| rc_mob wrote:
| Pure gut feeling from having to work with employees from both
| companies, but yes. I feel like RedHat people care more about
| open source toooling.
| nordsieck wrote:
| Probably not better in so far as they're also trying to make
| a buck.
|
| But IBM has pretty deep pockets - the kind where they could
| feasibly write off the bandwidth of a container image
| registry as a goodwill gesture and not bat an eye. Same with
| GitHub/Microsoft.
|
| From recently history, the same cannot be said about Docker
| the company.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| At this point they just should have kept going. Doing what they
| did is a all in move, backtracking just makes it worse.
| [deleted]
| yieldcrv wrote:
| "enough people switched away such that it's no longer a burden,
| but we also lost a bunch of other users too"
| atlgator wrote:
| Too late. We already ditched Docker for Podman. It was a lot
| easier than I expected.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| But most projects are still published to dockerhub aren't they?
| Or was this only for hosting of your own private images?
| verdverm wrote:
| This was about public images for free docker organizations
| (teams), used by many open source projects for branding /
| naming consistency.
|
| I maintain one of the projects which moved to ghcr.io and
| have no interest in moving back, only further away. They have
| shown their hand and can no longer be trusted as good
| stewards or ecosystem participants imo
| alphabettsy wrote:
| How does switching to Podman mitigate the problem of container
| image hosting that people were upset about?
| rc_mob wrote:
| lol true. but redhat does offe quay.io which is fine
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| You do realize that you moving away is actually a win for
| Dockerhub, right?
|
| Whole point of removing the free plan wasn't to squeeze money
| out from you, but to make you pay for the free storage and
| bandwidth. If you don't take up that free storage and bandwidth
| that is literally the same as removing your free plan.
|
| I don't know how podman does container storing, but if everyone
| moves over you probably shouldn't expect them to have free tier
| forever.
|
| EDIT: I would love to hear your counter arguments since you are
| downvoting. Why am I wrong?
| metadat wrote:
| You've fallen into the trap of an overly simplistic and
| narrow view.
|
| When projects and people move away from DockerHub, it hurts
| Docker-the-company because it further decreases their already
| tenuous and evaporating relevance.
|
| Reducing a fraction of storage and bandwidth costs isn't
| important compared to retaining mindshare and the perception
| of relevance.
|
| Edit: @nextlevelwizard The explanation you requested has been
| provided. Now it seems you're disagreeing with a common,
| widely accepted phenomenon. I was hoping for a more
| collaborative interaction.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| No company is moving anything. Individuals and some open
| source projects are moving. I am very surprised if this has
| any kind of effect.
| codeptualize wrote:
| With these things I always wonder how many people they ignored to
| push this through. I am pretty sure there are plenty of people at
| Docker who 100% accurately predicted this, spoke up about it, and
| got ignored.
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