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Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

blog.alexellis.io

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Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#181

Without entering into the specifics of this situation, I don’t understand the hate for Docker the company. They are providing a huge service for the community and looking for ways to make money from it to make it sustainable. I would give them a bit more empathy/benefit of the doubt as they iterate on their approach. Somewhere, somehow, someone has to pay for that storage and bandwidth whether directly or indirectly…

It’s a long standing hate for me that isn’t limited to just Docker, companies that used “we’re free” to obtain massive growth only to turn around and switch monetization models completely once they’ve become the dominant player in the market. It’s a massive distortion on the market, driving companies that tried to be fiscally sound from the start into irrelevancy while extremely inefficient ventures become the market leaders on account of superior funding.

Or to put it another way, Docker should have been focused on sustainability from the start and not dangled a price they knew couldn’t last in front of people to increase adoption.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Image hosting is expensive at scale, and someone's got to pay for the compute/storage/network.. Bit Torrent would beg to differ.

That's a neat idea but probably unworkable in practice. Container images need to be reliably available quickly; there is no appetite for the uncertainties surrounding the average torrent download

> That's a neat idea but probably unworkable in practice. Container images need to be reliably available quickly; there is no appetite for the uncertainties surrounding the average torrent download

Bittorrent seems to work quite well for linux isos, which are about the same size as containers, for obvious reasons.

IMO, the big difference is that, with bittorrent, it's possible to very inexpensively add lots of semi-reliable bandwidth.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#183
post #160
post #53

The only real moat they seem to have here is that "FROM" in a Dockerfile, "image:" in a docker-compose.yml file, and the docker command line default "somestring" as an image to "hub.docker.com:somestring". They pushed that with the aggressive rate limiting first though, which caused a lot of people to now understand that paragraph above and use proxies, specify a different "hub", etc. So this move, to me, has less le…

x/y expands to docker.io/x/y and z expands to docker.io/library/z

Right, it's a little different than my summary, but the main point was that they educated everyone that there's a way around that with specific image names, or a proxy, etc. If they push hard enough, the internet will route around them, distros will ship a patched docker, preset environment variables, or a docker->podman alias, etc. They will lose control over the "root namespace".

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#184

Docker the tool has been a massive benefit to software development, every now and then I have a moan about the hassle of getting something bootstrapped to run on Docker, but it's still worlds better than the old ways of managing dependencies and making sure everyone on a project is aligned on what versions of things are installed. Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying, this is the latest in a long line…

I'd like to see something resembling the Linux model. In the case of Docker, a foundation built around a suite of open source tools that's contributed to by pledges from all the big companies that use the tool. Maybe that means podman has a reliable source of funds for maintenance and improvement.

What I don't like is having these critical tools directly in the hands of a single for-profit corporation, at least where it can be avoided.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#185
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say a lot of bad stuff about Microsoft, but they are not known for randomly and suddenly killing of their services.

Serious question, though: how many services have they offered over the years that were free to anyone? Free to existing Windows users, perhaps, but free to the world doesn’t seem like something Microsoft was historically in a position to offer, much less later kill.

Hotmail/outlook.com and OneDrive are two services that Microsoft has been offering for decades, for free (with a storage limit, but that’s nothing weird), no Windows required.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#186
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Docker should have been a neat tool made by one enthusiast, just like curl is. I have nothing but mad respect for Daniel Stenberg. 25 years of development of great software, for which he had been threatened[1] and had ridiculous US travel visa obtaining issues[2]. [1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192025 [2] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/1…

I read the travel issues post you linked, but am not seeing the causal link you’re drawing between development of software and visa issues. Was there more to the story?

I may have remembered incorrectly, which post was it. Here[1], in the paragraph titled "Why they deny me?" (unlinkable), Daniel hints at the possibility that this may have been due to development of (lib)curl which is used for malware creation by 3rd parties. There was no proof though.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/07/28/administrative-purgat...

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker should have been a neat tool made by one enthusiast, just like curl is. Instead it has a multi-million dollar company behind it, and VC's who demand profits from a thing that shouldn't have ever had a business plan.

I think that Docker can have a viable business plan but they had terrible execution. At my previous position, I wanted to use DockerHub more heavily but the entire experience was like a bootstrap project someone did as a university assignment. Many advanced features for organizations were lacking (SSO/SAML) that we would have happily paid for.

That, plus not being willing to accept Purchase Orders, doomed them with my employer.

It's as if they had no idea how things work at large enterprises that are older than most Docker employees.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#188

Docker the tool has been a massive benefit to software development, every now and then I have a moan about the hassle of getting something bootstrapped to run on Docker, but it's still worlds better than the old ways of managing dependencies and making sure everyone on a project is aligned on what versions of things are installed. Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying, this is the latest in a long line…

Does that mean it would be a good idea to start moving to the podman ecosystem? RedHat/IBM seem to have this figured out better.

I m doing that personally but I m very hesitant about mentioning that to $job.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#189

> Start publishing images to GitHub And when GitHub starts similar shenanigans, move out to where? I am old enough to know the we can't trust BigTech and their unpredictable behaviors. Eventually we need to start a Codeberg like alternative using Prototype funds to be self reliant. 1: https://codeberg.org/ 2: https://prototypefund.de/

We need to use a distributed system instead of a centralised one. Probably built on a source control system that can handle that.

a collection of distributed systems. start your own. connect with other enthusiasts in your area to get them connected.

Re: Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know

#190
post #3

Can we just get the big three cloud players to make a new public repo? They’ve got oodles of bandwidth and storage, plus the advantage that a lot of access would be local to their private networks. Setup a non-profit, dedicate resources from each of them spendable as $X dollars of credits, and this problem is solved in a way that works for the real world. Not some federated mess that will never get off the ground.

quay.io is a pretty popular general-purpose repo, it replaced docker.io for many projects when they started rate-limiting.
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