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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

#161

Post by elbigbad »

voytec wrote: post #128
londons_explore wrote: post #36

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.

> 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?

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

#162

Post by Sebb767 »

osigurdson wrote: post #95
Sebb767 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The dev model of "we've lost track of our dependencies so ship Ubuntu and a load of state" never sat well. Docker, the company, is failing. Docker, as in containerization technology, is alive and very well. (edited for clarity)

>> Docker, the company, is failing. Docker, the container technology, is alive and very well. Is it though? Podman is more well liked (no daemon / non-root) and Kubernetes doesn't have direct support for it any more. I don't think it matters much that k8s uses CRI-O but docker needs to be #1 for running a container on a single machine. Yet, they seem to be letting that slip away because it is not directly monetizable…

> Is it though? Podman is more well liked (no daemon / non-root) and Kubernetes doesn't have direct support for it any more.

I've used "Docker" as in "containerization", since they are often used synonymously and the grandparents intent was definitely to criticize the latter. Docker itself will quite likely stay around as a name, but I have no faith in the company.

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

#163

Post by gwd »

davedx wrote: post #38
FlyingSnake wrote: post #31

> 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/

It actually sounds reasonable to me? They have an open source program, the article says its open source definition is "too strict" because it says you must have "no pathway to commercialization". I mean why should you expect someone to host gigabytes of docker images for you, for free?

Gitlab's Open Source program has similar restrictions, and it's just kind of weird. Like, there are multiple companies actually making money off of Xen; but because Xen is owned by a non-profit foundation (with a six-digit yearly budget), and the foundation isn't trying to profit, it still qualifies. (As does, for instance, the GNOME project.)

OTOH, somewhere else in this context it was mentioned that curl is almost entirely maintained by one guy who makes money from consulting; and because of that, he wouldn't qualify.

So if you're either small enough to be a side hobby project, or large enough to have your own non-profit, you can get it for free; anywhere in between and you have to pay.

Personally I'd be happy for Xen to pay for Gitlab Ultimate, except that the price model doesn't really match an open-source project: we can't tell exactly how many people are going to show up and contribute, so how can we pay per-user?

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

#164

Post by dralley »

windexh8er wrote: post #101
pydry wrote: 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…

OTOH, Docker didn't want to support a lot of features that enterprise customers wanted, like self-hosted private registries, because they wanted people using Dockerhub.

And wasn't the runtime problems because Docker was very very late to adopting CGroups v2?

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

#165

Post by wongarsu »

osigurdson wrote: post #80
jon-wood wrote: post #13

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 Docker succeed. They invented / formalized the space and deserve credit for that. They are probably doing the right thing with some of their development tooling (though maybe that should just be spun off to Microsoft) and ensuring images do not contain badware is something companies will pay for. However, their core offering must be the leader if they want to survive. Devs must want to use "docker run…

> their core offering must be the leader if they want to survive. Devs must want to use "docker run" instead of "podman run"

If their core offering is container hosting, they should be able to make a company out of that even without the client. After all jfrog and cloudsmith are more per less just that, as is github.

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

#166

Post by sirius87 »

roydivision wrote: post #145

Docker should never have become a business. There’s virtually nothing there to make a business around, it’s a suite of useful utilities that should have remained a simple open source project. I switched to podman a while ago and haven’t looked back.

Docker Hub does host images running into several GBs for even small hobby projects, and they also bear network transfer costs. Even with podman, you're going to have to host your images somewhere, right?

Right now, the internet infrastructure heavily relies on the good graces of Microsoft (Github, npm), and storage space and network transfer charges are taken for granted.

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

#167

Post by pydry »

windexh8er wrote: post #101
pydry wrote: 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…

>Podman is backed by much larger corporate machinery. If anyone thinks that Podman "winning" is a good thing then you've played right in to Walsh's antics.

I'm not making a moral judgement. I'm just saying that docker had serious technical problems and docker the business sucked at monetizing it.

Docker played into red hat's tactics. I've never heard of Matt Walsh and frankly, I've wanted rootless containers for years before I ever heard of podman.

>Podman wasn't built out of necessity but out of fiscal competitive maneuvering.

Becuase red hat is a business not a charity.

I doubt they would have built a better docker if docker wasn't refusing to improve.

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

#168

Post by shubb »

voytec wrote: post #128
londons_explore wrote: post #36

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.

> 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…

Replying to child I can't reply to?

There was a period where the US was treating public key encryption like arms exports, and involved in spreading the technology outside the US as tools were in us.govs sht list

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

#169

Post by comprev »

voytec wrote: post #128
londons_explore wrote: post #36

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.

> 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 consider him equally important to people like Tim Berners-Lee for building the foundation of the web.

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

#170

Post by brodock »

mfer wrote: post #107
tyingq wrote: 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?

Docker Hub is a massive expense when you consider the data storage and egress. To do that for open source projects you have to wither (a) have a lot of income to cover such an expense, (b) a pile of VC funding to cover the expense, or (c) pile on the debt paying for it while you grow. (b) and (c) can only live on so long.

I wonder if they would have a much smaller bill if they were running on physical hardware instead of renting infrastructure from AWS.

This is really not much different from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133510 case.

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