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Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

theregister.com

531–540 of 597 posts

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#531

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.

The engine on Windows is nonfree (both cost and freedom).

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 user…

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.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#533
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.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#534
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, how often do you change tags after you've built a container and for what reason if so?

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…

> 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`)

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#535
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.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

or you can work entirely without root and have the same user on the host also in the container:

podman run --userns=keep-id

(useful when a directory is mounted into container but the application refuses to run as root)

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#537
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

My personal guess was that they get eaten by Microsoft and Docker will be integrated more deeply with VS (Code) and GitHub.

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#538
post #61

Rancher Desktop is an open source container management and Kubernetes desktop app. https://rancherdesktop.io/ Disclosure: I work on Rancher Desktop. Feedback welcome.

Can I run Docker Compose and Docker Swarm with this, or is only Kubernetes supported?

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

> Does Mac have any sort of built-in VM framework like Hyper-V?

Two, actually. Hypervisor.framework [0] to build virtualization solutions on top of a lightweight hypervisor, without third-party kernel extensions, and Virtualization.framework, to create virtual machines and run Linux-based operating systems.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor?languag...

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization?lan...

Re: Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies

#540
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you mean APT via https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/ , correct?

I would strongly recommend docker.io from Ubuntu/Debian repos. This will be always Apache 2.0 licensed. (It's a fork of Moby packaged by Debian people).

Docker Engine looks problematic since the license isn't clear at all. For instance, Microsoft didn't include Docker into GitHub Actions, they also forked Moby and packaged it on their own, since they can't comply with the End User Agreement of Docker Engine.

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