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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

#481

Post by twblalock »

grumple wrote: post #472
twblalock wrote: post #447

It was sad to see people defending Docker Desktop changing from free to paid licenses. Now Docker is charging for even more things that used to be free. The defenders are reaping what they have sown. Next time a company starts to charge for things that used to be free, remember not to encourage it, because that will only make it happen more. People don't like this and many of them are not going to trust Docker in the…

Nothing a company does is free to them. To expect them to provide a free service at all, let alone one with high costs associated with it, is not reasonable. They don't owe the world free service, same for any other company.

When you offer something for free and then suddenly start charging for it, you are jerking around your customers -- especially when you do it with such confusing and incomplete communication as Docker has provided in this instance.

This is effectively a long-term bait and switch. This is not ok.

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

#482

Post by hosh »

rcme wrote: post #425
Strom wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no real distinction between those two phrases here, because the person using those phrases isn't ultimately in control.

Even if they were fully in control, there still would not be a distinction because whoever is controller this decision could change their mind at a later date.

My analysis of this:

After Kubernetes became the de-facto container orchestration platform, Docker sold a bunch of their business to Mirantis. They shifted their marketing and positioning from enterprise to developers. From public sources, it sounds like their strategy is doing pretty well.

The question then is, does Docker look like they are committed to open-source and the open-source ecosystem?

1. You would think that a developer-focused strategy would involve open-source, and that doing things to decrease their influence on the open-source world would reduce their influence, branding, and narrow their funnel. (But maybe not. Are the people paying for Docker Desktop also big open-source users and advocates?).

2. It sounds like Docker has full-time internal teams that maintain the official Docker images and accept PRs from upstream.

3. Docker rate-limited metadata access for public repositories. Is that a signal for weakening support for open-source?

4. According to the article, the Docker Open Source program is out-of-touch ...

5. ... But they may still be paying attention to the big foundations like CNCF and Apache. So the images people depend upon for those may not be going away anytime soon

So I would look for other signals for diminishing commitment to open-source:

- If several of the larger projects pulls out of hosting on Docker Hub

- If the internal Docker teams are getting let go

- If the rate at which PRs are accepted for the official images are reduced

- If the official images are getting increasingly out of sync with upstream

- Some other signals that matches

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

#483

Post by hosh »

sangnoir wrote: post #479
cpitman wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the responses here are talking about how to vendor/cache images instead of depending on an online registry, but remember that you also need access to a supply chain for these images. Base images will continue to be patched/updated, and you need those to keep your own images up to date. Unless the suggestion is to build all images, from the bottom up, from scratch.

It's a stop-gap measure. There are dozens of companies chomping at the bit to replace Docker as THE docker registry: I'd bet someone at Github is very busy at this very moment.

The article talked about using the Github Container Registry, which was launched in 2020.

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

#484

Post by stingraycharles »

Strom wrote: post #408
legohead wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"don't expect" or "for certain"? Can't really plan ahead without some kind of certainty.

There is no real distinction between those two phrases here, because the person using those phrases isn't ultimately in control.

One could argue that only the person who is in control could say “for certain”, and as such, that is the implicit differentiator between those two phrases.

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

#485

Post by zamnos »

cshimmin wrote: post #389
karamanolev wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useful information, bad look for Docker - "Oh, no slash as the namespace separator. Good and easy way to tell, that's how I would've done it!".

I mean, it's not a terrible convention. On the website they have a badge ("docker official image"), but devs aren't usually looking at the website, they're looking at their Dockerfile in vim or whatever. This is a straightforward way to communicate that semantically through namespacing. Still, shame on docker for the rug-pull.

It's better than none, but explicit over implicit. If it were namespaced like PULL docker.org/offical/alpine:latest that would be better, imo.

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

#486

Post by sigwinch28 »

This is incredibly frustrating to deal with because of how deeply the registry name is baked into Dockerfiles and image names. We end up "mirroring" our base images but there's some disconnect internally between "oh, yeah, our harbor.company/library/debian:bullseye is some random pull of library/debian:bullseye from the docker hub".

Imagine if you needed to change mirrors for `apt` and as part of that process you had to change all of the names of installed packages because the hostname of the mirror formed part of the package's identifier.

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

#487

Post by 999900000999 »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #473

The OP goes through a lot of trouble to obscure they are asking for $35 a month, which honestly I think most people can afford, even if its open source software they develop only out of kindness. So I'm not really buying that argument. That said I don't really want to reward Docker for writing themselves in as the distribution hub for all things docker and then more or less extorting money from people. I think the so…

Ehh.

How much money should I spend on my hobbies, 35$ isn't a lot, but I'd rather not waste it.

Plus instead of just grabbing the image I come up with to do x or y, you'll have to implement it yourself. Duplicate this hundreds or thousands of times.

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

#488

Post by zamnos »

stingraycharles wrote: post #484
Strom wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no real distinction between those two phrases here, because the person using those phrases isn't ultimately in control.

One could argue that only the person who is in control could say “for certain”, and as such, that is the implicit differentiator between those two phrases.

I mean yeah okay fine the phrase is then "according to your understanding of the rules set forth by Docker, as of today's edit of the linked PDF (2023-03-15), and in accordance with the current (2023-03-15) configuration of the three images, `alpine`, `node`, and `golang`; are those three images covered by the open source program and will continue to be accessible or will those images cease to be accessible by non-paying members of the general public in thirty (30) days?"

It's just that I'd thought we'd moved past the need for that level of pedantry here, but apparently not.

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

#490

Post by chaxor »

mc4ndr3 wrote: post #414
aprdm wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can vendor images. Never have your product depend on something that is in the internet. Spin up Harbour locally and put it in the middle to cache at the very least.

Imagine if everyone actually did this. Then we would have a myriad of base images hiding even more malware than we do currently. Not to mention vertically integrating the entire Docker layer set defeats the whole point of using Docker in the first place.

What are you talking about? Malware and spyware is just as likely (if not very much *more* likely - depending on the definition of malware or spyware*) to be in corporate sponsored software than it is in foss software, and that idea extends to software distribution.

I would expect the security and quality of images in a decentralized system to be far superior to any centralized system spun up by some for profit entity.

* malware and spyware could be defined here as software that allows remote keylogging, camera activation, installation of any executables, etc - i.e. root access - which is precisely what most corporate entities make software to do (e.g. "security solutions" that you have to install on your work computers). This is also most web services which are 90% tracking with an occasional desired application or feature these days.

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