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One important question to ask yourself is, what happens next time they want more money? Just how much of a hostage are you willing to be?
by _jal 5y ago
One important question to ask yourself is, what happens next time they want more money? Just how much of a hostage are you willing to be?
- yunohn 5y agoThis can be said of literally any paid service. It’s not much of an argument, except on these kinds of HN threads.
- _jal 5y agoA reasonable point. It is, however, much easier to say it of a service that has a history of flailing around about how and what they want money for than one that has a consistent history of not being surprising.
- mbreese 5y agoThe more nuanced argument is that the reaction to Docker’s change to charging for the Desktop version is less about the money and more about the stability of the company itself. Surprising your customer base by charging for a previously free product shows that the financials of the company aren’t very stable. This, in turn, is a red flag to rely too heavily on this particular product. Which can then start to cause a downward spiral, if not managed correctly. But honestly, we already knew this about Docker. They’ve always had issues trying to figure out their business plan.
- yunohn 5y agoUnfortunately, despite HN’s insistence that FOSS is sustainable - they have realized the truth, as seen by replies with views similar to yours, that Devs are too stingy to pay and support Dev tools.
- dijit 5y ago"Depends". IntelliJ and Visual Studio are doing perfectly well. Maybe not every tiny little tool should be a subscription. (yes, docker is a tiny tool compared to, say, linux, or kubernetes)
- yunohn 5y agoIt’s good for the world that random HNers don’t get to decide what other people/companies should do to please them.
- mbreese 5y agoDeveloper tools have always been a tough business to be in. On one hand, you have tools that people love to use that pay the bills. I’m thinking about tools like IntelliJ. But for each of these, there is an Eclipse project that is right there trying to keep pace. And many companies choose Eclipse because it’s free, but others choose IntelliJ because of the quality. I use Eclipse for Kava projects because it’s “good enough” and when I started programming Java, paying for IntelliJ wasn’t something I could afford. On the other hand, we’re developers… so many of us like building our own tools. Why are there so many options for text editors? Depending on the type of tool, it might just be easier/fun to build your own tool. It is possible to make money in FOSS, but you really have to get the business plan right from the beginning. It’s a hard business to be in. If you haven’t read it, “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg is a great story about just how hard it is to make a successful FOSS project, even for experienced teams. It details all of the ups and downs of the Chandler project from the early 2000’s.
- yunohn 5y agoSo your point is that you (personally) don’t like their business model, and don’t like funding the company that created the free Docker software and ecosystem that you use all the time?