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I've been fortunate enough to work at companies where engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It works well for a while, but eventually every

I've been fortunate enough to work at companies where engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It works well for a while, but eventually everyone accumulates a lot of random recurring charges and the company cracks down. $21 is nothing for a one-time spend. $21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before that person can get started. It's not bad when it's just a couple key pieces of software, but it doesn't take long before every engineer has some mix of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses and you're on the phone with a different vendor every week doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price they're asking. Soon, all of those "cheap" tools have added up to $1000/month or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of the time. And it's terrible. When the tool isn't easily replaceable, you deal with it. I'm not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate toward the latter.

cies 5y ago
> requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times This! I've always said that a bit reason for FLOSS to win over the internet server-side is because scaling fast and juggling livenses is just too hard. Especially with the prying eyes of Oracle/MSFT/etc's powerful legal teams and hidden "phone home" code. Going with a LAMP stack was just to simplest way to keep moving at speed.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  What would have happened if Microsoft had put some clause in volume licenses that said "you can use a system unlicensed for up to 30 days before paying for a license". Then engineering can spin up loads of instances to test stuff and scale fast with minimal hassle, and it'll be the purchasing team playing catchup later, no longer in the decisionmaking path.
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    that trick might work once or twice, until a hard policy comes into effect after the company gets burned.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    People do that with EAs. Once they figure out that it’s happening, they have various means to detect it.
  - brazzledazzle 5y ago
    For non-prod/qa/testing/dev stuff Microsoft provides MSDN/Visual Studio Subscriptions which provide specially licensed versions of their operating systems and software. Everyone who uses the MSDN software must have their own subscription and it can’t be used by real users/customers except in a limited dev/test capacity (e.g. UAT).
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  I’ve had this very conversation with work colleagues. We can go through the inordinate-pain of acquiring a licence, and all that entails, or we can choose open-source solution and be making progress by the end of the day. There’s a dozen services I could buy for work that would probably improve things dramatically, for very little cost, but almost nothing is worth the pain of “get sign off. Get sign off again. Fill in paperwork. Wait n weeks. Get more sign off. Wait even longer for finance to do their thing.”
acdha 5y ago
One other big factor: certain other vendors have very aggressive sales tactics which essentially boil down to “buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need or we’ll audit every computer in your company and charge a penalty for anything we can find to quibble with”. Docker doesn’t need to actually do that to run afoul of policies based on the scar tissue from those other vendors. Simply going from “you can use it without being sued” to “we have to pay people to make sure we’ll win” will increase the perceived cost at many large shops.
- kristjansson 5y ago
  Yup, this is the concern. Having been kindly asked by Oracle to remove virtualbox extensions, this sort of gotcha/conditional pricing feels dangerous
  - acdha 5y ago
    The big thing for me is the question of the future: they say they currently won't be predatory about it[1] and I have no reason to doubt that the people saying that are being completely honest, but we don't know who will be working there in the future or where the next acquisition/merger will take them. Without a contract, it's hard to disagree with the policy types who are going to ask what protects the organization if that happens. Once you go down this path even a little, the barriers to entry at large organizations go up since you have to look at it from the perspective of both the upfront cost and possible future cost / off-ramps. 1. https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston/status/1432726492958453761 https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston/status/143272649295845376...
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Docker is a company that won’t exist in a few years, so a promise of leniency now means nothing. When they are merged into some other big company, that company will look to milk the cow by going after license compliance. It happens every time.
      - bakuninsbart 5y ago
jeremyjh 5y ago
Fixing this has to be a great business opportunity. Surely someone is already working on it?
- danudey 5y ago
  A simple local k8s installation with a simple but effective GUI on top, running containerd instead of docker and with a CLI wrapper for docker commands, would be more than enough for everything I need.
  - mook 5y ago
    My team is working on https://rancherdesktop.io/ https://rancherdesktop.io/ and it's scary how closely matches we're doing (depending on what you consider to be effective UI)…
  - oblio 5y ago
    Yeah, but who's going to pay for that development? Especially since the targets are Windows and MacOS.
danudey 5y ago
Our company has a lot of processes that could be streamlined via containerization of build and development environments, across Windows, Mac, and Linux. But arguing for $252/yr times a thousand developers (in the office I work in, at least; we have others elsewhere) is just untenable. If the value was there for us, then we could get it signed off on, but there's no way to build that value because now it's too expensive to get started.
wahern 5y ago
Someone making $250k/year shouldn't think twice dropping $21/month on a tool that truly makes them more productive. A year or two ago I bought a personal license to Ubuntu FIPS after being urgently asked to debug an issue w/ Python's OpenSSL bindings. Unsurprisingly it turned out that my company had an enterprise license, and had I known whom to contact (which I didn't), I could have gotten a license key in a couple of days. But why waits days and potentially many thousands of dollars of time when I could buy a license now and get started immediately? Frankly, it's weird how Silicon Valley employees making obscene amounts of money balk at personal expenses as if they're some minimum wage employee being victimized by their employer nickel-and-diming them. But that's just me. In fact, except at startups, Silicon Valley corporations neither expect this nor even give you credit for taking such initiative.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that shouldn't be followed. Because it hides the true cost of a project, which may result in poor decisions later on. Because the cost of a decision/process should fall on the person or company who has the ability to change it. Because using wages to pay for business expenses wasn't part of the employment agreement. Any one of these would suffice. For personal expenses (meaning expenses for my own hobby projects, not "personal expenses" to mean business expenses paid by an employee as you have used it), $21 would be a quick decision. But using that same $21 to shore up a faulty requisition process? Nope, not at all.
  - wahern 5y ago
    The problem is that there's simply no easy fix for these bureaucratic frictions and sub-optimal equilibriums. It's the nature of large organizations--they trade efficiencies in some areas for inefficiencies in others. I decided long ago not to worry about such expenses because 1) the engineer in me hates this inefficiency and urges me to fix or work around it (depending on your perspective), 2) navigating bureaucratic red tape takes a personal toll, and as someone who is paid well I don't mind at all spending a trivial amount of money for my own wellbeing, even if its for work, and 3) as someone who has worked in startups and even founded one, I've both been in a position where I was expected to take on such expenses and expected others to do the same (at least as an initial matter[1]). [1] The dilemma is that unless the purchaser faces some risk of incurring the expense themself, they're not as incentivized to consider the reasonableness of the purchase. The solution is either 1) requiring permission beforehand, or 2) hiring more mature employees who understand the nature of the dilemma and who have already factored this responsibility and risk into their negotiated compensation. The latter doesn't scale, though, which is why large organizations invariably regress to the former.
physicsguy 5y ago
> When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license that's how it's worked for me - in my last job spent 3 weeks waiting for a Qt License, Intel compiler license, MSVC license...
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It's almost as if a manager or engineer shouldn't manage the overall finances of a company or department... Gee, I wonder if there's a job title or something like that that could manage finances like this? Real talk: Just hire people. The US especially has a huge amount of college educated people who struggle to find a job that matches their chosen education. If you can't find someone that matches the exact profile, pay for an education and training. As a company, don't accept just winging it - especially not if you have enough money.
floatingatoll 5y ago
20 is an extremely low estimate. It is more like the greater of N solutions for N teams, and M solutions for M people.

cies 5y ago

> requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times This! I've always said that a bit reason for FLOSS to win over the internet server-side is because scaling fast and juggling livenses is just too hard. Especially with the prying eyes of Oracle/MSFT/etc's powerful legal teams and hidden "phone home" code. Going with a LAMP stack was just to simplest way to keep moving at speed.

londons_explore 5y ago
What would have happened if Microsoft had put some clause in volume licenses that said "you can use a system unlicensed for up to 30 days before paying for a license". Then engineering can spin up loads of instances to test stuff and scale fast with minimal hassle, and it'll be the purchasing team playing catchup later, no longer in the decisionmaking path.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  that trick might work once or twice, until a hard policy comes into effect after the company gets burned.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  People do that with EAs. Once they figure out that it’s happening, they have various means to detect it.
- brazzledazzle 5y ago
  For non-prod/qa/testing/dev stuff Microsoft provides MSDN/Visual Studio Subscriptions which provide specially licensed versions of their operating systems and software. Everyone who uses the MSDN software must have their own subscription and it can’t be used by real users/customers except in a limited dev/test capacity (e.g. UAT).
FridgeSeal 5y ago
I’ve had this very conversation with work colleagues. We can go through the inordinate-pain of acquiring a licence, and all that entails, or we can choose open-source solution and be making progress by the end of the day. There’s a dozen services I could buy for work that would probably improve things dramatically, for very little cost, but almost nothing is worth the pain of “get sign off. Get sign off again. Fill in paperwork. Wait n weeks. Get more sign off. Wait even longer for finance to do their thing.”

acdha 5y ago

One other big factor: certain other vendors have very aggressive sales tactics which essentially boil down to “buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need or we’ll audit every computer in your company and charge a penalty for anything we can find to quibble with”. Docker doesn’t need to actually do that to run afoul of policies based on the scar tissue from those other vendors. Simply going from “you can use it without being sued” to “we have to pay people to make sure we’ll win” will increase the perceived cost at many large shops.

kristjansson 5y ago
Yup, this is the concern. Having been kindly asked by Oracle to remove virtualbox extensions, this sort of gotcha/conditional pricing feels dangerous
- acdha 5y ago
  The big thing for me is the question of the future: they say they currently won't be predatory about it[1] and I have no reason to doubt that the people saying that are being completely honest, but we don't know who will be working there in the future or where the next acquisition/merger will take them. Without a contract, it's hard to disagree with the policy types who are going to ask what protects the organization if that happens. Once you go down this path even a little, the barriers to entry at large organizations go up since you have to look at it from the perspective of both the upfront cost and possible future cost / off-ramps. 1. https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston/status/1432726492958453761 https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston/status/143272649295845376...
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Docker is a company that won’t exist in a few years, so a promise of leniency now means nothing. When they are merged into some other big company, that company will look to milk the cow by going after license compliance. It happens every time.
    - bakuninsbart 5y ago

jeremyjh 5y ago

Fixing this has to be a great business opportunity. Surely someone is already working on it?

danudey 5y ago
A simple local k8s installation with a simple but effective GUI on top, running containerd instead of docker and with a CLI wrapper for docker commands, would be more than enough for everything I need.
- mook 5y ago
  My team is working on https://rancherdesktop.io/ https://rancherdesktop.io/ and it's scary how closely matches we're doing (depending on what you consider to be effective UI)…
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but who's going to pay for that development? Especially since the targets are Windows and MacOS.

danudey 5y ago

Our company has a lot of processes that could be streamlined via containerization of build and development environments, across Windows, Mac, and Linux. But arguing for $252/yr times a thousand developers (in the office I work in, at least; we have others elsewhere) is just untenable. If the value was there for us, then we could get it signed off on, but there's no way to build that value because now it's too expensive to get started.

wahern 5y ago

Someone making $250k/year shouldn't think twice dropping $21/month on a tool that truly makes them more productive. A year or two ago I bought a personal license to Ubuntu FIPS after being urgently asked to debug an issue w/ Python's OpenSSL bindings. Unsurprisingly it turned out that my company had an enterprise license, and had I known whom to contact (which I didn't), I could have gotten a license key in a couple of days. But why waits days and potentially many thousands of dollars of time when I could buy a license now and get started immediately? Frankly, it's weird how Silicon Valley employees making obscene amounts of money balk at personal expenses as if they're some minimum wage employee being victimized by their employer nickel-and-diming them. But that's just me. In fact, except at startups, Silicon Valley corporations neither expect this nor even give you credit for taking such initiative.

MereInterest 5y ago
Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that shouldn't be followed. Because it hides the true cost of a project, which may result in poor decisions later on. Because the cost of a decision/process should fall on the person or company who has the ability to change it. Because using wages to pay for business expenses wasn't part of the employment agreement. Any one of these would suffice. For personal expenses (meaning expenses for my own hobby projects, not "personal expenses" to mean business expenses paid by an employee as you have used it), $21 would be a quick decision. But using that same $21 to shore up a faulty requisition process? Nope, not at all.
- wahern 5y ago
  The problem is that there's simply no easy fix for these bureaucratic frictions and sub-optimal equilibriums. It's the nature of large organizations--they trade efficiencies in some areas for inefficiencies in others. I decided long ago not to worry about such expenses because 1) the engineer in me hates this inefficiency and urges me to fix or work around it (depending on your perspective), 2) navigating bureaucratic red tape takes a personal toll, and as someone who is paid well I don't mind at all spending a trivial amount of money for my own wellbeing, even if its for work, and 3) as someone who has worked in startups and even founded one, I've both been in a position where I was expected to take on such expenses and expected others to do the same (at least as an initial matter[1]). [1] The dilemma is that unless the purchaser faces some risk of incurring the expense themself, they're not as incentivized to consider the reasonableness of the purchase. The solution is either 1) requiring permission beforehand, or 2) hiring more mature employees who understand the nature of the dilemma and who have already factored this responsibility and risk into their negotiated compensation. The latter doesn't scale, though, which is why large organizations invariably regress to the former.

physicsguy 5y ago

> When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license that's how it's worked for me - in my last job spent 3 weeks waiting for a Qt License, Intel compiler license, MSVC license...

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

It's almost as if a manager or engineer shouldn't manage the overall finances of a company or department... Gee, I wonder if there's a job title or something like that that could manage finances like this? Real talk: Just hire people. The US especially has a huge amount of college educated people who struggle to find a job that matches their chosen education. If you can't find someone that matches the exact profile, pay for an education and training. As a company, don't accept just winging it - especially not if you have enough money.

floatingatoll 5y ago

20 is an extremely low estimate. It is more like the greater of N solutions for N teams, and M solutions for M people.