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Genuine question: How much of that financial improvement is due to them requiring companies to now pay for Docker Desktop on macOS? We found ourselves essential

by mdeeks 4y ago

Genuine question: How much of that financial improvement is due to them requiring companies to now pay for Docker Desktop on macOS? We found ourselves essentially with no option but to pay up for a full year on short notice. We want nothing of their other paid offerings like builds or repo hosting. The sales rep basically confirmed we're just paying for the thing we used to get for free now. The whole call was a giant "FU, too bad". Left an extremely bad taste in our mouths. Obviously we're going to focus heavily on dumping Docker Desktop as fast as possible in the next quarters.

ahtihn 4y ago
> Obviously we're going to focus heavily on dumping Docker Desktop as fast as possible in the next quarters. If you need to invest significant effort into dumping it, it's almost certainly cheaper to just pay for it. Especially so if the alternative makes any sort of compromise on developer experience.
- pantry-man 4y ago
  My workplace is also working on dumping docker desktop. Their website says it's $24 per month per user if you have over 100 users. We have around 2000 engineers, so it's half a million dollars a year for something that used to be free. If it takes two engineers half a year to get a replacement working you're already back in black, and honestly I'm not even sure why (in our specific case) it would take that long when there already are free alternatives.
  - mdeeks 4y ago
    In our case we have multiple tools that wrap docker and at first try none of them worked with podman. Podman doesn't actually have an API socket you can interact with. There is something called podman-helper but for the life of me I could not get it to work reliably. Also the API responses were not formatted the same way so now our code has to detect and fork logic if it is podman And this is only the first example I saw. Now we have to root out all apps everywhere across the company that might integrate this tightly with docker. Then there are performance considerations. Docker Inc apparently did quite a bit to improve performance, especially disk perf. We need to verify all of our existing workflows still work reliably. None of this is hard, it just takes time and effort.
- ridruejo 4y ago
  Yes, there is not a clear, free alternative. The license kicks in at 10MM in revenue, at that point there are certain things that are easier to pay than try to replace (Slack, Google Apps… ). Everyone has to make their own decision of where they focus their attention/money, in my case I have authorized for every one of my reports that has needed it and just moved on …
holografix 4y ago
Genuine question: do you think people creating software that’s incredibly valuable for you should’t get paid? You had it for free for a long time? Lucky you!
- cogman10 4y ago
  I don't think anyone has a problem with that. The problem is really more one of "we operated so long without paying and now, blam, everyone pays next year". It'd be sort of like if github deciding "You know what, everyone now needs to pay $7 a month/user for github". Perfectly within their right, but also a little bit of whiplash for a large number of people. The next question is if this will last. There's already competitors to docker (rancher/podman/various k8s on my box things).
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Exactly! They decided that you would rather pay than migrate off it, so they can start charging, and stop leaving substantial money on the table. It seems that their assumptions were correct.
- mdeeks 4y ago
  It feels like a bait and switch. They got us hooked on a free product and then slapped us with a bill and only short time to change all of our software to not use it if we didn't want to. Also the pricing jumped up the longer you waited to sign. So we had little time to evaluate Rancher and others. I do agree it is a product that is potentially worth paying for. I do NOT think that the product is worth the amount we were suddenly forced to pay. It felt like extortion.
nine_k 4y ago
Last time I checked, it was completely possible to install Virtualbox and normal Docker CLI on a Mac, and everything worked well (for me), without Docker Desktop at all. But that last time was on Intel Macs; maybe the situation is completely different on ARM.
- mdeeks 4y ago
  It doesn't work on M1 last I checked. And anyway even if they updated Virtualbox for ARM, Oracle is predatory and sends nasty emails about paying up if they detect anyone in your company uses it.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I remember that the open-source Virtualbox part is free from any nagware. The closed-source parts are those needed for desktop integration (good screen, clipboard, file sharing, etc), but they are not needed for running a Linux VM with Docker (or some other container runtime BTW).
acdha 4y ago
I’m mixed on this because I generally like paying for tools but this was too fast (institutional budget year pain) and Docker Mac was characterized by long-running unfixed bugs like high CPU usage. I think they really screwed up their business model and are burning through goodwill trying to recover but I wish they’d tried working with the community. I mostly use the CLI so I have Podman a try and it took less than a single lunch to completely replace Docker for me. Performance is excellent for ARM, and acceptable for the x86 containers I infrequently use. https://gist.github.com/acdha/9be1c3521af4f18d9f86264a889581e2 https://gist.github.com/acdha/9be1c3521af4f18d9f86264a889581...

by mdeeks 4y ago

ahtihn 4y ago

> Obviously we're going to focus heavily on dumping Docker Desktop as fast as possible in the next quarters. If you need to invest significant effort into dumping it, it's almost certainly cheaper to just pay for it. Especially so if the alternative makes any sort of compromise on developer experience.

pantry-man 4y ago
My workplace is also working on dumping docker desktop. Their website says it's $24 per month per user if you have over 100 users. We have around 2000 engineers, so it's half a million dollars a year for something that used to be free. If it takes two engineers half a year to get a replacement working you're already back in black, and honestly I'm not even sure why (in our specific case) it would take that long when there already are free alternatives.
- mdeeks 4y ago
  In our case we have multiple tools that wrap docker and at first try none of them worked with podman. Podman doesn't actually have an API socket you can interact with. There is something called podman-helper but for the life of me I could not get it to work reliably. Also the API responses were not formatted the same way so now our code has to detect and fork logic if it is podman And this is only the first example I saw. Now we have to root out all apps everywhere across the company that might integrate this tightly with docker. Then there are performance considerations. Docker Inc apparently did quite a bit to improve performance, especially disk perf. We need to verify all of our existing workflows still work reliably. None of this is hard, it just takes time and effort.
ridruejo 4y ago
Yes, there is not a clear, free alternative. The license kicks in at 10MM in revenue, at that point there are certain things that are easier to pay than try to replace (Slack, Google Apps… ). Everyone has to make their own decision of where they focus their attention/money, in my case I have authorized for every one of my reports that has needed it and just moved on …

holografix 4y ago

Genuine question: do you think people creating software that’s incredibly valuable for you should’t get paid? You had it for free for a long time? Lucky you!

cogman10 4y ago
I don't think anyone has a problem with that. The problem is really more one of "we operated so long without paying and now, blam, everyone pays next year". It'd be sort of like if github deciding "You know what, everyone now needs to pay $7 a month/user for github". Perfectly within their right, but also a little bit of whiplash for a large number of people. The next question is if this will last. There's already competitors to docker (rancher/podman/various k8s on my box things).
- nine_k 4y ago
  Exactly! They decided that you would rather pay than migrate off it, so they can start charging, and stop leaving substantial money on the table. It seems that their assumptions were correct.
mdeeks 4y ago
It feels like a bait and switch. They got us hooked on a free product and then slapped us with a bill and only short time to change all of our software to not use it if we didn't want to. Also the pricing jumped up the longer you waited to sign. So we had little time to evaluate Rancher and others. I do agree it is a product that is potentially worth paying for. I do NOT think that the product is worth the amount we were suddenly forced to pay. It felt like extortion.

nine_k 4y ago

Last time I checked, it was completely possible to install Virtualbox and normal Docker CLI on a Mac, and everything worked well (for me), without Docker Desktop at all. But that last time was on Intel Macs; maybe the situation is completely different on ARM.

mdeeks 4y ago
It doesn't work on M1 last I checked. And anyway even if they updated Virtualbox for ARM, Oracle is predatory and sends nasty emails about paying up if they detect anyone in your company uses it.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I remember that the open-source Virtualbox part is free from any nagware. The closed-source parts are those needed for desktop integration (good screen, clipboard, file sharing, etc), but they are not needed for running a Linux VM with Docker (or some other container runtime BTW).

acdha 4y ago

I’m mixed on this because I generally like paying for tools but this was too fast (institutional budget year pain) and Docker Mac was characterized by long-running unfixed bugs like high CPU usage. I think they really screwed up their business model and are burning through goodwill trying to recover but I wish they’d tried working with the community. I mostly use the CLI so I have Podman a try and it took less than a single lunch to completely replace Docker for me. Performance is excellent for ARM, and acceptable for the x86 containers I infrequently use. https://gist.github.com/acdha/9be1c3521af4f18d9f86264a889581e2 https://gist.github.com/acdha/9be1c3521af4f18d9f86264a889581...