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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

#271
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they potentially could have made a decent business out of it but they made a lot of bad business decisions. I find myself shaking my head at a lot of their technical decisions too. Podman seems to me to be a case study for how to do this right.

Podman is interesting. I like the architecture problems it solves with respect to Docker but the way they went about it was typical big business Red Hat. Dan Walsh, Podman's BDFL it seems, basically stood in front of RHEL / OpenShift customers for years bashing Docker even when a majority of the things he was claiming were less than half baked. RHEL made sly moves like not supporting the Docker runtime, even at a tim…

You may have a healthy dislike for the corporate behemoth that is RH / IBM, but, to my mind, Docker, Inc is worse: they keep more things closed, and they literally pressure for money.

I mean, I wish guys like FSF would have produced a viable Docker alternative, but this hasn't happened, at least yet.

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

#272
It is my understanding that Microsoft has previously tried to purchase Docker. Despite me having problems with companies buying up each other, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft revisits, or already is revisiting, buying Docker.

Being a heavy Visual Studio Code user, I have centered my personal development around Docker containers using VS Code's Devcontainer feature, which is a very, very nice way of developing. All I need installed is VS Code and Docker, and I can pull down and start developing any project. (I'm not there yet for all my personal projects, but that's where I'm headed.)

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

#273
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, I can do a lot of record revenue and earnings selling five dollar bills for $4. I'm curious what a path to profit would look like...is this kind of squeeze the only way to get there?

that would make you negative one dollar of earnings per sale

unless you use dotcom accounting, in which case you can say that you lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is going to accept worrying about whether the torrent has enough people seeding in the middle of a CI run. And your usual torrent download is an explicit action with an explicit client, how are people going to seed these images and why would they? And what about the long tail?

Nobody needs to be seeding if only one download is active. You could self host an image at home on a Raspberry Pi and provide an image in a minute. Nobody's CI should be depending on an external download of that size.

We are talking about replacing the docker hub and the like, what people "should" be doing and what happens in the real world are substantially different. If this hypothetical replacement can't serve basic existing use cases it is dead at the starting line.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be escrowing any Docker images you depend on, I'd have thought.

> escrowing Are you sure this is what you mean? Escrow is a type of contactual arrangement, one type of which is agreeing with a commercial partner that you get a copy of their source-code if they go broke. I feel like you mean vendoring.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but we used to call this mirroring.

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

#276

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…

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.

> 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.

But you don't have to host curl? Who's gonna put the money to host all the images and bandwidths that ten of thousands of companies use but never pay?

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could, you know, host a Docker registry and reupload those images to something you control. Worst case scenario, in 30 days, nothing is gone from Docker and you can just spin it down. Your job as an SRE is not to look at things and go "oh well, nothing we can do lol".

Yes, that involves ripping out Docker Hub everywhere. It's a significant chunk of work, not something easily fit into 30 days on a team that is already strapped for resources with more work than we can do.

Setting up harbor as a docker proxy-cache is actually quite simple

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean "demand profit"? Last time I check rent is not free, food is not free, bus ticket is not free. No reason why software should be free. Open source was invented by big co as a "marginalized your complement" strategy, not the ideal that is marketed as. As an evidence, I do not see any cloud vendor open source their code?

> Open source was invented by big co as a "marginalized your complement" strategy, not the ideal that is marketed as. > In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project to write a complete operating system free from constraints on use of its source code. Particular incidents that motivated this include a case where an annoying printer couldn't be fixed because the source code was withheld from users. from https://e…

From your very link, 1983's GNU Project was not the first piece of Open Source software.

From your link: The first example of free and open-source software is believed to be the A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-r…

Nobody is going to accept worrying about whether the torrent has enough people seeding in the middle of a CI run. And your usual torrent download is an explicit action with an explicit client, how are people going to seed these images and why would they? And what about the long tail?

Cache images locally. Docker has enough provisions for image mirrors and caches.

Downloading tens or hundreds of megabytes of exactly the same image, on every CI run, on someone else's expense, is expectedly unsustainable.

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