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So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made. The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality. Do you reall

So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made. The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality. Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250

gfiorav 5y ago
Exactly. This makes sense. USD 21 per user/month + bulk discount is nothing. If companies want to roll their own they can, but most won't. Docker Desktop adds a lot of value if only by removing the hassle for quick os-agnostic development.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  What is the value add for Docker Desktop? In a world where podman exists, what's the point of docker on dev machines anyway?
  - trey-jones 5y ago
    Well, I hadn't heard of podman until now, and I imagine I'm not the only one. Does it consistently have functional parity with docker?
    - eric__cartman 5y ago
      I use it on my Fedora dev machine and it's pretty good. Still wouldn't replace a mission critical machine with it, as it isn't the primary target for docker containers to run on and it can break more easily.
      - hda111 5y ago
        It will break from time to time. But so does Docker Desktop. Neither Docker nor Podman are suitable for mission critical stuff. Their market is entirely dev machines and devs can fix in on their own.
        robertlagrant 5y ago
        > Neither Docker nor Podman are suitable for mission critical stuff. Their market is entirely dev machines and devs can fix in on their own. Pretty sure they're used for more than that.
    - eptcyka 5y ago
      trey-jones, I apologize, but I cannot reply to you directly. The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs entirely in userspace on Linux. Having said that, I use it as a drop-in replacement for Docker and it's only become better in the past year. This is somewhat irrelevant to the Docker Desktop product, as podman doesn't provide a nice packaged up solution, but you can use podman on Windows and Mac as long as you have a Linux host available, either as a guest VM or as a machine _elsewhere_ on the network, see [1]. I only use Linux if I can, and the ability to run images without having to run a daemon with root privileges is a very big bonus for me, but it might not be for you. Now I do wonder, how hard would it be to declare a minimal nixOS VM for running as one's podman host :) [1]: https://podman.io/getting-started/installation.html https://podman.io/getting-started/installation.html
      - Sebb767 5y ago
        > The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs entirely in userspace on Linux. As I see it, that's the whole selling point. Need to have something with limited rights or build a container without root? Podman is the way to go.
        eptcyka 5y ago
        I agree, what's missing is a nice VM appliance for macOS and Windows.
        Frost1x 5y ago
        This is what singularity did in the HPC world (amongst other handy features): https://singularity.hpcng.org/ https://singularity.hpcng.org/
        rhatdan 5y ago
        No true. Podman runs natively on a MAC, using a Linux VM for containers, just like Docker. `podman machine init` pulls down a VM, after which you can start running, developing, and building the same images that Docker and Kubernetes use. Just `brew install podman`. For Windows, Podman is available on many distributions in WSL2.
      - 5y ago
    - zerkten 5y ago
      It doesn't matter if it has parity of functionality when Docker has grown to the point where it has name recognition with enterprises and a sales team that can engage with these large customers. It needs to have parity in all other pseudo-layers (3rd party tool support, support plans, OS support, someone to sign a contract with, compliance tools, etc.) We know most of these go unused or have no real meaning to devs, but they unlock enterprise procurement. I believe podman has a linkage to RedHat which may actually bring all of the things that procurement want to hear, but the question is whether the door is open to RedHat, or not. Procurement departments can be fickle, preferring Oracle for everything or the other way round trying to eradicate Oracle while permitting a combination of others. It's all politics based on previous experiences and opinions in the end.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      It doesn't do caching, which disqualifies it from many use cases unfortunately: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-build.1.html https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-build.1.htm... > --cache-from > Images to utilize as potential cache sources. Podman does not currently support caching so this is a NOOP.
  - theptip 5y ago
    Docker for Mac includes a Kubernetes cluster that’s way better than minikube etc. Not sure the bare docker daemon VM wrapper has a defensible moat though. Maybe this does more in Windows?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - andyroid 5y ago
    How about the fact that not all, or even most, dev machines run Linux, which is the only platform podman supports?
    - oplav 5y ago
      I don't use podman, but a quick search shows that you can install podman on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Are you referring to something else? https://podman.io/getting-started/installation https://podman.io/getting-started/installation
      - dralley 5y ago
        If you read the instructions, they basically say that you still need a Linux VM or WSL environment to run Podman in. Which makes it not a complete replacement for Docker desktop, which handles the VM for you. So OP isn't wrong.
        Conan_Kudo 5y ago
        Podman 3.3 and up has `podman machine`, which is supposed to do this for you...
        kristjansson 5y ago
        Apparently it's already deprecated https://github.com/boot2podman/machine https://github.com/boot2podman/machine ?
        dralley 5y ago
        That's an unrelated tool named "podman-machine". "podman machine", as in the subcommand to "podman" proper, is not deprecated.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        So that's a couple hours for the first dev to make a list of WSL setup instructions or a VM template, and 5 minutes each for every dev after.
  - gfiorav 5y ago
    The fact that you could do something alternative doesn’t mean it’s easy, supported, or streamlined for developers or company tech ops. I don’t think that thinking like an engineer will help you understand the value add here.
swiftcoder 5y ago
That sort of depends on the size of business under discussion. If you are a Fortune 500 with 2,000 engineers who all need licenses... half a million in licensing costs is not always the easiest sell. Of course, that fortune 500 is going to pick up the phone and demand to pay 1/4 of that (and they'll probably get it). Enterprise sales is fun
- otterley 5y ago
  *Actual fun may vary.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
The places where I worked there's an inverse relationship - the smaller the cost, the harder it is to justify with finances. ($4000 monthly AWS bill for "testing purposes"? No questions asked. $10 wireless mouse? Mission impossible!)
- qeternity 5y ago
  Exactly. Cost is a proxy for importance (usually). I can’t be bothered to approve your $10 mouse, but I can be bothered to approve your $10k AWS budget.
- WhatsName 5y ago
  In case you aren't aware, it's easy to explain by that fact that most finance departments are afraid to question your spendings on grounds of looking incompetent. So it's less about 10$ and more about: "I understand what a wireless mouse is and it doesn't look mission critical to me." "No idea what those items on that AWS bill mean, but I'll probably be better off not asking"
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    “2.4Ghz Laser Based Human Interface Device, $10” seems cheap approved.
    - aenis 5y ago
      Too cheap. Been in a few places where getting 700k for something with a boring but plausible name was a no questions asked thing, but trying to get a $15 miro board license was literally impissible. I paid for a lot of tools out of my own pocket to avoid the hassle. I bet I am not alone with this approach.
      - thevagrant 5y ago
        Agree. I have subsidized places where I worked due to this. Bosses often say - oh don't pay yourself but then when you put in the request for something months will go by waiting for that certain manager to say yes or no. Face to face or on the phone it's easy to get a 'yes but first send me the proposal/information', only then to get ignored. Yeah you can keep pushing and finally get the item you need months later, but by then the project is over cause you or someone else hacked together or found a free solution... or worse used a personal credit card.
namdnay 5y ago
That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc… Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation
- jdwithit 5y ago
  This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget. The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    A lot of the driver here is not in the moment short-sightedness, but rather a byproduct of the procurement or other finance processes (ironically often instituted with intent to prevent waste and fraud or make the company more efficient). It’s not just the $250/yr/dev, but rather the requirements to create a new vendor in the ERP morass, to get approvals for an exception to the standards for payment terms (and/or methods), any requirements for vetting vendors, etc. If you’re selling to an enterprise, don’t charge just above whatever the “employees can put it on their card without approval”. If you’re going to exceed that, you might as well exceed it by a lot. (If you’re going to make every developer file an expense report every month, I can readily prefer to do a lot of command line typing rather than filing an expense report… If I automate that for a lot of my fellow devs, I get to do something fun and be a minor folk hero.) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
    - zapita 5y ago
      A lot of those enterprises already have Docker on the vendor list though, because of Docker Hub.
efsavage 5y ago
Many engineers at large companies won't want to bother dealing with the headaches around licensing software and spending money, whether it's $2/mo or $21/mo or $200/mo. If it's a core part of my job and the best option available, it'd be worth it, but if there's any reasonable alternative, I'll go download that today instead of wading through all of the lawyers and approvals and compliance to use something slightly better.
- dheera 5y ago
  If you're getting started, sure. If you already have a live deployment then the company's bigger fear is the a risk of switching to a completely new infrastructure and they'll all of a sudden push the paperwork quickly to stay on their existing codebase.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  Even when the purchase process has been streamlined it's still a headache for a piece of software I might only use 1-2 times a year.
fmakunbound 5y ago
It’s not at all about the price. Obviously a corporation can afford that. It’s the sheer dread of even starting the procurement process in your average corporation that your average developer must overcome, that is the barrier. I’d rather investigate an alternative like running it on a VM than deal with that. Actually I’d rather shave my face with some mace in the dark than deal with that.
Cacti 5y ago
lol obviously you’ve never worked in a giant bureaucratic corporation.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post personal swipes or unsubstantive comments. If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you can't do that or don't want to, that's fine, but then please don't post. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- qeternity 5y ago
  Lol obviously you’ve never risen to a level of management in a giant corporation. It’s ok. Just keep telling yourself you’re smarter than everyone else.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
regularfry 5y ago
I honestly don't think I could get Docker Desktop through our procurement process before the end of the grace period. It's not a matter of "this is peanuts" as much as "we're guaranteed to breach the license terms if we keep using this thing, so everyone has to get off it now." And then once it's gone, we'll limp along with whatever plugs the gap until something else emerges a as a winner, which probably won't be Docker Desktop.
- truffdog 5y ago
  This reminds me of the genius of AWS. The engineering team can just buy whatever they want, no questions asked.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Hey we get asked plenty of questions when the bill comes in :)
stevebmark 5y ago
What companies are offering $250k/year for engineers?
- yellowbkpk 5y ago
  At least Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft.
- ArchOversight 5y ago
  When you add up salary + benefits + workplace amenities + taxes + software licenses and whatnot, you get there mighty quick.
  - stevebmark 5y ago
    I don't know what you mean by taxes, my question is about 250k base, excluding bonuses, stock, and excluding the supposed monetary value of benefits/training/travel/home office whatnot
    - golover721 5y ago
      In the US, companies are responsible for paying 50% of the medicare and social security taxes for each of their employees.
    - InvaderFizz 5y ago
      The statement was that the engineer is a $250k asset to the company. Rule of thumb TCO for headcount is 1.5-2x salary to account for taxes, Medicare, health insurance, equipment cost, licenses, office square footage, stock options, travel, etc. So a $250k asset from a business perspective is typically someone that makes $125k-$165k.
- adolph 5y ago
  TCO ain't paycheck offer Salary + Taxes (Payroll, etc) + Fringe (Healthcare, etc) + Dev licenses + Training/conferences = paycheck * (n > 1.5)
- 5y ago
ryandvm 5y ago
I think you're correct about existing users at large corporations. Converting all those into paid accounts is a no-brainer. However, this will have a massive change on the competitive landscape. For companies that haven't yet adopted Docker, this is a huge red checkmark. This change is going to spur development on open source alternatives like nothing else could.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Nah. We're not 250 people. We use docker, and we won't stop/switch because of it. This is such a good problem to have. I would love to cut Docker Inc. a check. And we've basically moved over to garden (a k8s dev env) anyway. But we still use docker plenty.
aprdm 5y ago
That math changes a lot in companies that don’t sell tech as their profits margin aren’t as fat. It also changes when you have 1000s of developers.
isoprophlex 5y ago
That's not how it works in my experience. If it costs more than 0 but less than 10k, the pencil pushers at procurement wont even answer your emails...
andix 5y ago
From my experience: Yes, they may jeopardize it. If docker and containerization is not yet widely used in the company, a lot of decisionmakers will not buy it, because they did fine without it for decades ;)
jandrese 5y ago
It's not the amount of money that is the issue, the issue is that it this wasn't budgeted into the project when it was proposed 2 years ago. It is software that falls under category S which means you can't use overhead funds it has to be a category S purchase, but you have no category S funds budgeted to the project because you were using free software. Being so cheap actually complicates the matters even more, since the finance people don't really want to mess with purchases less than $5,000, even though it is their own rule that requires all software to go through them regardless of cost. It just means they won't be willing to help very much.
tyingq 5y ago
>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Tech companies? No, they will probably cough up until they have another solution. IT departments in non-tech companies? Yes. I fully expect a circus there. Many won't have known it was being used, purchasing will have their ego bruised by a company "hijacking" them and won't want to pay, and so on.
captainmuon 5y ago
I guess it depends on the enterprise. I can imagine the thoughts of certain managers: Recurring costs? Something that used to be free and now they want money? Pricing per user? More expensive than Office 365?
raffraffraff 5y ago
True. Absolutely. But I guarantee you that this headline means that even junior "devops" engineers will have workable alternatives by tomorrow, and can tell you how to implement them with little friction.
mike_hock 5y ago
Which is why this shady tactic works time and again.
katzgrau 5y ago
That would be the wise thing to do, but I'm sure there are some ways companies will eff it up anyway. Survival of the fittest I guess. Management may want some badge of honor for saving a budget line item. Or developers may want to embark on a new and interesting project and successfully convince management it's a good idea, who will agree for a wide range of reasons (not pissing off developers might be one of them). Both will ignore the risk and considerable downsides. Happens all the time.
jpambrun 5y ago
I think you don't understand how big company procurement work. Getting legal's and procurement's attention to look at this is more effort than its worth. The logistics of managing licenses, single sign-on, etc is a nightmare. Besides, running docker is already frowned upon by InfoSec and require special permission. It will never happen where I work. Not because of money, but because it's too much trouble.
Aqueous 5y ago
$21 / user / month - so if you have 100 engineers that's $2100 a month or $25k a year. Still should be doable for most businesses that size but licensing costs can blow up when you start to have a lot of seats. An annoying thing about the company I work for is that they have a limited number of licenses for things like IDEs, so they ration them. And so I'll boot up an IDE for a language I work in less - like say, PyCharm - and it will stop working because my license got taken away and given to someone else. I'll have to request another one be given back to get working again, which is pretty annoying when I'm trying to get something done. I work mostly with Docker / Kubernetes so if I'm in a situation where my core tools are being constantly taken away, I'll be pretty miffed. I agree that Docker has every right to charge big companies for this software. Just wanted to point out that the costs can be more than you'd expect.
roguecoder 5y ago
That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool. VCs are shooting themselves in the foot here: it is very obvious that we should never adopt any technical tool backed by VC, because they will eventually try to make us an offer we can't refuse and then go out of business shortly thereafter when their extortion attempt doesn't work.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool. Lol yes, I know. My point was the cost of meatware is 3 orders of magnitude greater than the software, and likely less at scale. $100k/mo would mean 5,000 devs. I highly doubt a company with overheads near/in excess of a billion dollars/year is going to sweat a $1m expense for core infra like Docker.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Not just "think" - I know for a fact. Finance refuses to spend money if there is a "free" alternative, and Architecture rejects all software that isn't OSS licensed without a lengthy review process. It would take us at least 3 months to get approvals and POs for all the devs, if it even got approved, but more likely it would be in "batches" of licenses, further delaying roll-out. So instead the devs are beginning to install Linux VMs to run Docker from, or looking at podman. People forget that just because there's a "rational" decision, doesn't mean people (or businesses) will choose it. Businesses are run by humans, and humans are irrational and dumb. Path of least resistance wins.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The business license costs $21/month No, it costs $21/user/month. > Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? I work for a big enterprise that is currently going through a transition that is simultaneously a cloud transition and a transition to more critically consider tooling with license management overhead (which for a $21/seat license, is probably a significantly larger cost in a big, bureaucratic enterprise than the license cost itself.) That said, there's a good argument that the things that you get for that $21/seat are things many enterprises will find are still worth the license cost + license management overhead. On the other hand, most of that is stuff that doesn't scale with number of developer seats, so a subscription model that doesn't work on that basis and therefore doesn't impose the kind of license management overhead that per-seat licensing does would probably net Docker more revenue while imposing less total costs on enterprises.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > No, it costs $21/user/month. Do you guys not realize that I know that? I did the maths standardized to one seat. I’m not also suggesting that the entire engineering spend for 100+ person companies is $250k/year. Do the analysis on a per unit cost because that’s how life works: per unit cost of human capital and per unit cost of software vs. per unit value creation.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Do you guys not realize that I know that? Did you not read the rest of the post? I think you knew the license fee was per seat, I think you just think you failed (and fail, still) to understand the significance of that on the actual cost to the business imposed, of which the license fee itself is only a fraction.
ShakataGaNai 5y ago
Yes, yes they would. And they do. Regularly. When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar. Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great, you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited to see you've saved $50,000/year. Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some other category not to be touched. Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO. $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira. $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira & Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds up really fast when you multiply it out across all your Developers. And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container software costs more than your source code control solution? One of those two things you can very easily live without... and it's Docker.
- eitland 5y ago
  You basically typed out what I feel. Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name: "subscription fatigue" I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around. I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee. So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it. Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld. Edit: > Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem. But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.
seneca 5y ago
A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about $250k/year for this license. Any half competent manager is going to realize that money would be better spend on a single engineer focused on tooling, who can replace Docker Desktop in addition to working on other efficiency improvements.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about $250k/year for this license Would love to know how you arrived at this number. The list price for 100 engineers on the most expensive plan would be $25k/year and I guarantee Docker will do volume discounts. Additionally, the terms just say you need a paid plan, which presumably could be the cheapo $5/mo plan which would be $6k/year for 100 engineers.
  - seneca 5y ago
    Yes, you're correct, my numbers are completely wrong here. I'm unable the edit the post anymore, unfortunately.
__s 5y ago
I work at a large company. I added a USE_PODMAN environment variable for devs to use within an hour of finding out about this But maybe my company is too large; large enough companies can have smaller teams, other teams will probably go the licensing route
ryan_lane 5y ago
Local dev environments are used because it's what people are used to, and they're low friction to start using. The problem is that they're actually quite difficult to maintain at scale. Large businesses spend a considerable amount of time debugging local developer environments. Cloud IDEs have been popping up and are finally to the point of being usable (and in some cases even better than a local dev env). My company was already somewhat interested in checking out hosted IDEs, and today this pushed us to start some proof of concepts to move some teams over to github's codespaces. So, yes, businesses will adjust their workflows to avoid the cost since many were already interested in improving their workflows and relieving some of the burden on their developer environment tooling teams.
fnord77 5y ago
> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? YES! I've seen it. Stinginess at my shop regularly causes hours and hours of pricey engineering resources to address problems caused by underallocating cloud resources to the point things fail - or refusal to allow some cloud service because it will cost $100/month (despite saving 10s of thousands in eng resources) It's crazy but I bet it happens many places.
Spooky23 5y ago
Absolutely. The pricing model for this is really stupid. A $21/mo subscription is a pain in the ass — they would be better off just selling it perpetual for $1000. I ran a big enterprise shop for years. Nuisance licensing like this costs a fortune - I’d need to go do legal review, have it tracked for renewals and compliance, etc. Freemium product like this is always coupled with a stupid license enforcement audit that appears and tries to extort you. For a small quantity, overhead may be more than the product. As an enterprise consumer, it makes me question the viability of the company. $250 a year is priced to allow unit managers to use P-Cards to avoid procurement processes. It’s too cheap to make meaningful amounts of money, so unless it’s a way to shift me to a more intelligent model, I’d have folks assigned to investigate alternatives.
- tempodox 5y ago
  I love the term “nuisance licensing”. Considering how everyone and their grandmother is switching to subscription models I wonder why it didn't come up earlier.
TeeMassive 5y ago
Yeah that's great in theory. In practice you have to go to the official route (tm). Here's some of my experiences: 1) Internship at a well known tech corporation. I was on a project that would accelerate the debugging and diagnostic of a machine the whole factory depended on; tl;dr I was making an app to replace an overgrown Excel sheet. To do that we used an opensource library but the catch was that the maintainer made its money by placing the documentation under a paywall. At some point the project was going well but the leftovers from Google Code could not do anymore. So it took two months (TWO MONTHS!) to do a $15 USD one time payment with the company's credit card. Apparently the process took longer due to the fact we had to go through PayPal. 2) Another multi billion corporation, less big but still multinational. They spent hours and lots of money on internal propaganda to promote their "core values"; which of course included "agility". We wanted to buy a commercial code analysis tool to save time during code reviews and increase code quality of a code base where ~30 devs worked. No brainier right? We had the R&D department's VP's OK to buy the damn thing and ask for forgiveness to the mother ship later. After 6 months our team leader was still receiving calls and and form to fill. "Do you really need this? Did you think about other products? Did you have the OK from this person thousand of miles away and this other person who speaks in a very broken English?" Using the company's internal organism and salary tables we estimated that during those six months they have wasted about 5 years of licensing in salary.
patmcc 5y ago
>>>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Hahahahaha, yes, absolutely. Because if the wrong VP gets this in his head, it's not $250/year, it's "almost half a million dollars over 3 years" for the 500 employees or whatever. I've seen it happen.
dominotw 5y ago
> $250k/year fuck..i need to find a new job
lmilcin 5y ago
You are using logic. That's not how corporations work. I work remotely for large corporation (over 100k employees) and it wastes on average an hour of my productivity every day on stupid stuff. For example my office PC becomes unavailable every time it gets an update, at least once a week. They force restart during working hours. If there is somebody in the office I can call them to reboot it, if not I have to drive there. Everybody has the same problem. Meetings are disrupted, plans are thrown in disarray, people are loosing sometimes entire day of work. The problem has been known before covid and has not been solved. Any normal logical person would throw resources into solving the problem, but the people responsible just say they are busy and why is that a big problem if you can just press reboot?
martin-adams 5y ago
I once got told my my manager to reduce the cost of my email inbox on the server and download it to my local machine. This was email provided and owned by the very company I worked for, and it was costing enough for management to care. Maybe enterprises have changed since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff like this does start asking questions as it’s a new cost on a budget.
- dolmen 5y ago
  (Big) Enterprises nowadays have mandatory backups for emails. So downloading e-mails on clients doesn't remove the need of storing on the server.
GordonS 5y ago
Have you ever worked at a large corporation? I have, and let me tell you, they will spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars to fight a purchase of $21. I'm really not joking.

gfiorav 5y ago

Exactly. This makes sense. USD 21 per user/month + bulk discount is nothing. If companies want to roll their own they can, but most won't. Docker Desktop adds a lot of value if only by removing the hassle for quick os-agnostic development.

eptcyka 5y ago
What is the value add for Docker Desktop? In a world where podman exists, what's the point of docker on dev machines anyway?
- trey-jones 5y ago
  Well, I hadn't heard of podman until now, and I imagine I'm not the only one. Does it consistently have functional parity with docker?
  - eric__cartman 5y ago
    I use it on my Fedora dev machine and it's pretty good. Still wouldn't replace a mission critical machine with it, as it isn't the primary target for docker containers to run on and it can break more easily.
    - hda111 5y ago
      It will break from time to time. But so does Docker Desktop. Neither Docker nor Podman are suitable for mission critical stuff. Their market is entirely dev machines and devs can fix in on their own.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        > Neither Docker nor Podman are suitable for mission critical stuff. Their market is entirely dev machines and devs can fix in on their own. Pretty sure they're used for more than that.
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    trey-jones, I apologize, but I cannot reply to you directly. The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs entirely in userspace on Linux. Having said that, I use it as a drop-in replacement for Docker and it's only become better in the past year. This is somewhat irrelevant to the Docker Desktop product, as podman doesn't provide a nice packaged up solution, but you can use podman on Windows and Mac as long as you have a Linux host available, either as a guest VM or as a machine _elsewhere_ on the network, see [1]. I only use Linux if I can, and the ability to run images without having to run a daemon with root privileges is a very big bonus for me, but it might not be for you. Now I do wonder, how hard would it be to declare a minimal nixOS VM for running as one's podman host :) [1]: https://podman.io/getting-started/installation.html https://podman.io/getting-started/installation.html
    - Sebb767 5y ago
      > The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs entirely in userspace on Linux. As I see it, that's the whole selling point. Need to have something with limited rights or build a container without root? Podman is the way to go.
      - eptcyka 5y ago
        I agree, what's missing is a nice VM appliance for macOS and Windows.
      - Frost1x 5y ago
        This is what singularity did in the HPC world (amongst other handy features): https://singularity.hpcng.org/ https://singularity.hpcng.org/
      - rhatdan 5y ago
        No true. Podman runs natively on a MAC, using a Linux VM for containers, just like Docker. `podman machine init` pulls down a VM, after which you can start running, developing, and building the same images that Docker and Kubernetes use. Just `brew install podman`. For Windows, Podman is available on many distributions in WSL2.
    - 5y ago
  - zerkten 5y ago
    It doesn't matter if it has parity of functionality when Docker has grown to the point where it has name recognition with enterprises and a sales team that can engage with these large customers. It needs to have parity in all other pseudo-layers (3rd party tool support, support plans, OS support, someone to sign a contract with, compliance tools, etc.) We know most of these go unused or have no real meaning to devs, but they unlock enterprise procurement. I believe podman has a linkage to RedHat which may actually bring all of the things that procurement want to hear, but the question is whether the door is open to RedHat, or not. Procurement departments can be fickle, preferring Oracle for everything or the other way round trying to eradicate Oracle while permitting a combination of others. It's all politics based on previous experiences and opinions in the end.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    It doesn't do caching, which disqualifies it from many use cases unfortunately: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-build.1.html https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-build.1.htm... > --cache-from > Images to utilize as potential cache sources. Podman does not currently support caching so this is a NOOP.
- theptip 5y ago
  Docker for Mac includes a Kubernetes cluster that’s way better than minikube etc. Not sure the bare docker daemon VM wrapper has a defensible moat though. Maybe this does more in Windows?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- andyroid 5y ago
  How about the fact that not all, or even most, dev machines run Linux, which is the only platform podman supports?
  - oplav 5y ago
    I don't use podman, but a quick search shows that you can install podman on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Are you referring to something else? https://podman.io/getting-started/installation https://podman.io/getting-started/installation
    - dralley 5y ago
      If you read the instructions, they basically say that you still need a Linux VM or WSL environment to run Podman in. Which makes it not a complete replacement for Docker desktop, which handles the VM for you. So OP isn't wrong.
      - Conan_Kudo 5y ago
        Podman 3.3 and up has `podman machine`, which is supposed to do this for you...
        kristjansson 5y ago
        Apparently it's already deprecated https://github.com/boot2podman/machine https://github.com/boot2podman/machine ?
        dralley 5y ago
        That's an unrelated tool named "podman-machine". "podman machine", as in the subcommand to "podman" proper, is not deprecated.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        So that's a couple hours for the first dev to make a list of WSL setup instructions or a VM template, and 5 minutes each for every dev after.
- gfiorav 5y ago
  The fact that you could do something alternative doesn’t mean it’s easy, supported, or streamlined for developers or company tech ops. I don’t think that thinking like an engineer will help you understand the value add here.

swiftcoder 5y ago

That sort of depends on the size of business under discussion. If you are a Fortune 500 with 2,000 engineers who all need licenses... half a million in licensing costs is not always the easiest sell. Of course, that fortune 500 is going to pick up the phone and demand to pay 1/4 of that (and they'll probably get it). Enterprise sales is fun

otterley 5y ago
*Actual fun may vary.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

The places where I worked there's an inverse relationship - the smaller the cost, the harder it is to justify with finances. ($4000 monthly AWS bill for "testing purposes"? No questions asked. $10 wireless mouse? Mission impossible!)

qeternity 5y ago
Exactly. Cost is a proxy for importance (usually). I can’t be bothered to approve your $10 mouse, but I can be bothered to approve your $10k AWS budget.
WhatsName 5y ago
In case you aren't aware, it's easy to explain by that fact that most finance departments are afraid to question your spendings on grounds of looking incompetent. So it's less about 10$ and more about: "I understand what a wireless mouse is and it doesn't look mission critical to me." "No idea what those items on that AWS bill mean, but I'll probably be better off not asking"
- noir_lord 5y ago
  “2.4Ghz Laser Based Human Interface Device, $10” seems cheap approved.
  - aenis 5y ago
    Too cheap. Been in a few places where getting 700k for something with a boring but plausible name was a no questions asked thing, but trying to get a $15 miro board license was literally impissible. I paid for a lot of tools out of my own pocket to avoid the hassle. I bet I am not alone with this approach.
    - thevagrant 5y ago
      Agree. I have subsidized places where I worked due to this. Bosses often say - oh don't pay yourself but then when you put in the request for something months will go by waiting for that certain manager to say yes or no. Face to face or on the phone it's easy to get a 'yes but first send me the proposal/information', only then to get ignored. Yeah you can keep pushing and finally get the item you need months later, but by then the project is over cause you or someone else hacked together or found a free solution... or worse used a personal credit card.

namdnay 5y ago

That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc… Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation

jdwithit 5y ago
This poster has clearly worked at the same kind of companies I have. Plenty of them would gladly burn 10x what it would cost to just buy the damn license on engineering man-hours switching something that's inferior but free. Because it doesn't show up as an expense on the annual budget. The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  A lot of the driver here is not in the moment short-sightedness, but rather a byproduct of the procurement or other finance processes (ironically often instituted with intent to prevent waste and fraud or make the company more efficient). It’s not just the $250/yr/dev, but rather the requirements to create a new vendor in the ERP morass, to get approvals for an exception to the standards for payment terms (and/or methods), any requirements for vetting vendors, etc. If you’re selling to an enterprise, don’t charge just above whatever the “employees can put it on their card without approval”. If you’re going to exceed that, you might as well exceed it by a lot. (If you’re going to make every developer file an expense report every month, I can readily prefer to do a lot of command line typing rather than filing an expense report… If I automate that for a lot of my fellow devs, I get to do something fun and be a minor folk hero.) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
  - zapita 5y ago
    A lot of those enterprises already have Docker on the vendor list though, because of Docker Hub.

efsavage 5y ago

Many engineers at large companies won't want to bother dealing with the headaches around licensing software and spending money, whether it's $2/mo or $21/mo or $200/mo. If it's a core part of my job and the best option available, it'd be worth it, but if there's any reasonable alternative, I'll go download that today instead of wading through all of the lawyers and approvals and compliance to use something slightly better.

dheera 5y ago
If you're getting started, sure. If you already have a live deployment then the company's bigger fear is the a risk of switching to a completely new infrastructure and they'll all of a sudden push the paperwork quickly to stay on their existing codebase.
tjpnz 5y ago
Even when the purchase process has been streamlined it's still a headache for a piece of software I might only use 1-2 times a year.

fmakunbound 5y ago

It’s not at all about the price. Obviously a corporation can afford that. It’s the sheer dread of even starting the procurement process in your average corporation that your average developer must overcome, that is the barrier. I’d rather investigate an alternative like running it on a VM than deal with that. Actually I’d rather shave my face with some mace in the dark than deal with that.

Cacti 5y ago

lol obviously you’ve never worked in a giant bureaucratic corporation.

dang 5y ago
Please don't post personal swipes or unsubstantive comments. If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you can't do that or don't want to, that's fine, but then please don't post. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
qeternity 5y ago
Lol obviously you’ve never risen to a level of management in a giant corporation. It’s ok. Just keep telling yourself you’re smarter than everyone else.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

regularfry 5y ago

I honestly don't think I could get Docker Desktop through our procurement process before the end of the grace period. It's not a matter of "this is peanuts" as much as "we're guaranteed to breach the license terms if we keep using this thing, so everyone has to get off it now." And then once it's gone, we'll limp along with whatever plugs the gap until something else emerges a as a winner, which probably won't be Docker Desktop.

truffdog 5y ago
This reminds me of the genius of AWS. The engineering team can just buy whatever they want, no questions asked.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Hey we get asked plenty of questions when the bill comes in :)

stevebmark 5y ago

What companies are offering $250k/year for engineers?

yellowbkpk 5y ago
At least Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft.
ArchOversight 5y ago
When you add up salary + benefits + workplace amenities + taxes + software licenses and whatnot, you get there mighty quick.
- stevebmark 5y ago
  I don't know what you mean by taxes, my question is about 250k base, excluding bonuses, stock, and excluding the supposed monetary value of benefits/training/travel/home office whatnot
  - golover721 5y ago
    In the US, companies are responsible for paying 50% of the medicare and social security taxes for each of their employees.
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    The statement was that the engineer is a $250k asset to the company. Rule of thumb TCO for headcount is 1.5-2x salary to account for taxes, Medicare, health insurance, equipment cost, licenses, office square footage, stock options, travel, etc. So a $250k asset from a business perspective is typically someone that makes $125k-$165k.
adolph 5y ago
TCO ain't paycheck offer Salary + Taxes (Payroll, etc) + Fringe (Healthcare, etc) + Dev licenses + Training/conferences = paycheck * (n > 1.5)
5y ago

ryandvm 5y ago

I think you're correct about existing users at large corporations. Converting all those into paid accounts is a no-brainer. However, this will have a massive change on the competitive landscape. For companies that haven't yet adopted Docker, this is a huge red checkmark. This change is going to spur development on open source alternatives like nothing else could.

qeternity 5y ago
Nah. We're not 250 people. We use docker, and we won't stop/switch because of it. This is such a good problem to have. I would love to cut Docker Inc. a check. And we've basically moved over to garden (a k8s dev env) anyway. But we still use docker plenty.

aprdm 5y ago

That math changes a lot in companies that don’t sell tech as their profits margin aren’t as fat. It also changes when you have 1000s of developers.

isoprophlex 5y ago

That's not how it works in my experience. If it costs more than 0 but less than 10k, the pencil pushers at procurement wont even answer your emails...

andix 5y ago

From my experience: Yes, they may jeopardize it. If docker and containerization is not yet widely used in the company, a lot of decisionmakers will not buy it, because they did fine without it for decades ;)

jandrese 5y ago

It's not the amount of money that is the issue, the issue is that it this wasn't budgeted into the project when it was proposed 2 years ago. It is software that falls under category S which means you can't use overhead funds it has to be a category S purchase, but you have no category S funds budgeted to the project because you were using free software. Being so cheap actually complicates the matters even more, since the finance people don't really want to mess with purchases less than $5,000, even though it is their own rule that requires all software to go through them regardless of cost. It just means they won't be willing to help very much.

tyingq 5y ago

>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Tech companies? No, they will probably cough up until they have another solution. IT departments in non-tech companies? Yes. I fully expect a circus there. Many won't have known it was being used, purchasing will have their ego bruised by a company "hijacking" them and won't want to pay, and so on.

captainmuon 5y ago

I guess it depends on the enterprise. I can imagine the thoughts of certain managers: Recurring costs? Something that used to be free and now they want money? Pricing per user? More expensive than Office 365?

raffraffraff 5y ago

True. Absolutely. But I guarantee you that this headline means that even junior "devops" engineers will have workable alternatives by tomorrow, and can tell you how to implement them with little friction.

mike_hock 5y ago

Which is why this shady tactic works time and again.

katzgrau 5y ago

That would be the wise thing to do, but I'm sure there are some ways companies will eff it up anyway. Survival of the fittest I guess. Management may want some badge of honor for saving a budget line item. Or developers may want to embark on a new and interesting project and successfully convince management it's a good idea, who will agree for a wide range of reasons (not pissing off developers might be one of them). Both will ignore the risk and considerable downsides. Happens all the time.

jpambrun 5y ago

I think you don't understand how big company procurement work. Getting legal's and procurement's attention to look at this is more effort than its worth. The logistics of managing licenses, single sign-on, etc is a nightmare. Besides, running docker is already frowned upon by InfoSec and require special permission. It will never happen where I work. Not because of money, but because it's too much trouble.

Aqueous 5y ago

$21 / user / month - so if you have 100 engineers that's $2100 a month or $25k a year. Still should be doable for most businesses that size but licensing costs can blow up when you start to have a lot of seats. An annoying thing about the company I work for is that they have a limited number of licenses for things like IDEs, so they ration them. And so I'll boot up an IDE for a language I work in less - like say, PyCharm - and it will stop working because my license got taken away and given to someone else. I'll have to request another one be given back to get working again, which is pretty annoying when I'm trying to get something done. I work mostly with Docker / Kubernetes so if I'm in a situation where my core tools are being constantly taken away, I'll be pretty miffed. I agree that Docker has every right to charge big companies for this software. Just wanted to point out that the costs can be more than you'd expect.

roguecoder 5y ago

That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool. VCs are shooting themselves in the foot here: it is very obvious that we should never adopt any technical tool backed by VC, because they will eventually try to make us an offer we can't refuse and then go out of business shortly thereafter when their extortion attempt doesn't work.

qeternity 5y ago
> That price is per person, not total. The highest total I've heard so far is going to cost that company $108k a month, for a development tool. Lol yes, I know. My point was the cost of meatware is 3 orders of magnitude greater than the software, and likely less at scale. $100k/mo would mean 5,000 devs. I highly doubt a company with overheads near/in excess of a billion dollars/year is going to sweat a $1m expense for core infra like Docker.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Not just "think" - I know for a fact. Finance refuses to spend money if there is a "free" alternative, and Architecture rejects all software that isn't OSS licensed without a lengthy review process. It would take us at least 3 months to get approvals and POs for all the devs, if it even got approved, but more likely it would be in "batches" of licenses, further delaying roll-out. So instead the devs are beginning to install Linux VMs to run Docker from, or looking at podman. People forget that just because there's a "rational" decision, doesn't mean people (or businesses) will choose it. Businesses are run by humans, and humans are irrational and dumb. Path of least resistance wins.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The business license costs $21/month No, it costs $21/user/month. > Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? I work for a big enterprise that is currently going through a transition that is simultaneously a cloud transition and a transition to more critically consider tooling with license management overhead (which for a $21/seat license, is probably a significantly larger cost in a big, bureaucratic enterprise than the license cost itself.) That said, there's a good argument that the things that you get for that $21/seat are things many enterprises will find are still worth the license cost + license management overhead. On the other hand, most of that is stuff that doesn't scale with number of developer seats, so a subscription model that doesn't work on that basis and therefore doesn't impose the kind of license management overhead that per-seat licensing does would probably net Docker more revenue while imposing less total costs on enterprises.

qeternity 5y ago
> No, it costs $21/user/month. Do you guys not realize that I know that? I did the maths standardized to one seat. I’m not also suggesting that the entire engineering spend for 100+ person companies is $250k/year. Do the analysis on a per unit cost because that’s how life works: per unit cost of human capital and per unit cost of software vs. per unit value creation.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Do you guys not realize that I know that? Did you not read the rest of the post? I think you knew the license fee was per seat, I think you just think you failed (and fail, still) to understand the significance of that on the actual cost to the business imposed, of which the license fee itself is only a fraction.

ShakataGaNai 5y ago

Yes, yes they would. And they do. Regularly. When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar. Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great, you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited to see you've saved $50,000/year. Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some other category not to be touched. Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO. $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira. $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira & Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds up really fast when you multiply it out across all your Developers. And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container software costs more than your source code control solution? One of those two things you can very easily live without... and it's Docker.

eitland 5y ago
You basically typed out what I feel. Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name: "subscription fatigue" I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around. I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee. So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it. Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld. Edit: > Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem. But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.

seneca 5y ago

A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about $250k/year for this license. Any half competent manager is going to realize that money would be better spend on a single engineer focused on tooling, who can replace Docker Desktop in addition to working on other efficiency improvements.

qeternity 5y ago
> A company with 100 $250k/year engineers would be billed about $250k/year for this license Would love to know how you arrived at this number. The list price for 100 engineers on the most expensive plan would be $25k/year and I guarantee Docker will do volume discounts. Additionally, the terms just say you need a paid plan, which presumably could be the cheapo $5/mo plan which would be $6k/year for 100 engineers.
- seneca 5y ago
  Yes, you're correct, my numbers are completely wrong here. I'm unable the edit the post anymore, unfortunately.

__s 5y ago

I work at a large company. I added a USE_PODMAN environment variable for devs to use within an hour of finding out about this But maybe my company is too large; large enough companies can have smaller teams, other teams will probably go the licensing route

ryan_lane 5y ago

Local dev environments are used because it's what people are used to, and they're low friction to start using. The problem is that they're actually quite difficult to maintain at scale. Large businesses spend a considerable amount of time debugging local developer environments. Cloud IDEs have been popping up and are finally to the point of being usable (and in some cases even better than a local dev env). My company was already somewhat interested in checking out hosted IDEs, and today this pushed us to start some proof of concepts to move some teams over to github's codespaces. So, yes, businesses will adjust their workflows to avoid the cost since many were already interested in improving their workflows and relieving some of the burden on their developer environment tooling teams.

fnord77 5y ago

> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? YES! I've seen it. Stinginess at my shop regularly causes hours and hours of pricey engineering resources to address problems caused by underallocating cloud resources to the point things fail - or refusal to allow some cloud service because it will cost $100/month (despite saving 10s of thousands in eng resources) It's crazy but I bet it happens many places.

Spooky23 5y ago

Absolutely. The pricing model for this is really stupid. A $21/mo subscription is a pain in the ass — they would be better off just selling it perpetual for $1000. I ran a big enterprise shop for years. Nuisance licensing like this costs a fortune - I’d need to go do legal review, have it tracked for renewals and compliance, etc. Freemium product like this is always coupled with a stupid license enforcement audit that appears and tries to extort you. For a small quantity, overhead may be more than the product. As an enterprise consumer, it makes me question the viability of the company. $250 a year is priced to allow unit managers to use P-Cards to avoid procurement processes. It’s too cheap to make meaningful amounts of money, so unless it’s a way to shift me to a more intelligent model, I’d have folks assigned to investigate alternatives.

tempodox 5y ago
I love the term “nuisance licensing”. Considering how everyone and their grandmother is switching to subscription models I wonder why it didn't come up earlier.

TeeMassive 5y ago

Yeah that's great in theory. In practice you have to go to the official route (tm). Here's some of my experiences: 1) Internship at a well known tech corporation. I was on a project that would accelerate the debugging and diagnostic of a machine the whole factory depended on; tl;dr I was making an app to replace an overgrown Excel sheet. To do that we used an opensource library but the catch was that the maintainer made its money by placing the documentation under a paywall. At some point the project was going well but the leftovers from Google Code could not do anymore. So it took two months (TWO MONTHS!) to do a $15 USD one time payment with the company's credit card. Apparently the process took longer due to the fact we had to go through PayPal. 2) Another multi billion corporation, less big but still multinational. They spent hours and lots of money on internal propaganda to promote their "core values"; which of course included "agility". We wanted to buy a commercial code analysis tool to save time during code reviews and increase code quality of a code base where ~30 devs worked. No brainier right? We had the R&D department's VP's OK to buy the damn thing and ask for forgiveness to the mother ship later. After 6 months our team leader was still receiving calls and and form to fill. "Do you really need this? Did you think about other products? Did you have the OK from this person thousand of miles away and this other person who speaks in a very broken English?" Using the company's internal organism and salary tables we estimated that during those six months they have wasted about 5 years of licensing in salary.

patmcc 5y ago

>>>Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year? Hahahahaha, yes, absolutely. Because if the wrong VP gets this in his head, it's not $250/year, it's "almost half a million dollars over 3 years" for the 500 employees or whatever. I've seen it happen.

dominotw 5y ago

> $250k/year fuck..i need to find a new job

lmilcin 5y ago

You are using logic. That's not how corporations work. I work remotely for large corporation (over 100k employees) and it wastes on average an hour of my productivity every day on stupid stuff. For example my office PC becomes unavailable every time it gets an update, at least once a week. They force restart during working hours. If there is somebody in the office I can call them to reboot it, if not I have to drive there. Everybody has the same problem. Meetings are disrupted, plans are thrown in disarray, people are loosing sometimes entire day of work. The problem has been known before covid and has not been solved. Any normal logical person would throw resources into solving the problem, but the people responsible just say they are busy and why is that a big problem if you can just press reboot?

martin-adams 5y ago

I once got told my my manager to reduce the cost of my email inbox on the server and download it to my local machine. This was email provided and owned by the very company I worked for, and it was costing enough for management to care. Maybe enterprises have changed since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff like this does start asking questions as it’s a new cost on a budget.

dolmen 5y ago
(Big) Enterprises nowadays have mandatory backups for emails. So downloading e-mails on clients doesn't remove the need of storing on the server.

GordonS 5y ago

Have you ever worked at a large corporation? I have, and let me tell you, they will spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars to fight a purchase of $21. I'm really not joking.