What has Docker become?

> The idea of not compensating for software took hold in the 2000s, both with engineers and consumers (remember when users scoffed at 99 cent apps?)

Part of that was that the platform churn costs were a new thing for developers that needed to be priced in now. In the "old world" aka Windows, application developers didn't need to do much, if any at all, work to keep their applications working with new OS versions. DOS applications could be run up until and including Windows 7 x32 - that meant in the most ridiculous case about 42 years of life time (first release of DOS was 1981, end of life for Win 7 ESU was 2023). As an application developer, you could get away with selling a piece of software once and then just provide bug fixes if needed, and it's reasonably possible to maintain extremely old software even on modern Windows - AFAIK (but never tried it), Visual Basic 6 (!!!) still runs on Windows 11 and can be used to compile old software.

In contrast to this, with both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS) as an app developer you have to deal with constant churn that the OS developer forces upon you, and application stores make it impossible to even release bugfixes for platforms older than the OS developer deems worthy to support - for Google Play Store, that's Android 12 (released in 2021) [1], for iOS the situation is a bit better but still a PITA [2].

[1] https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44222561

I was a contractor code money at a place automating $3M/yr in labor. We reported to a senior that did little programming if at all. He was older than me but newer than myself to the company, I was happy to avoid meetings and code.

He'd always try to get us into various technologies, Docker was one of them. It wasn't really relevant for the job, but I could see its uses.

Now that I think about it, I don't think anything they did on the tech discovery front was useful. Got stuck on Confulence which required us to save as a .pdf for our users to view lmao. Credit for being super smart with coding, he was a wiz on code reviews.

What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user, and that it keeps images between users in a database. I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.

Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?

> As they scaled, it became impossible to compete.

To compete at offering infrastructure maybe, but what I would like is more capability to build solutions.

And I think that today one has much more open-source technologies that one can deploy with modest efforts, so I see progress, even if some big players take advantage of people that don't want or are not capable to make even modest efforts.