10 ms·

I suspect the initial negative take on the license change was correct, and this is the dying gasp of the company. It's just taking longer than expected to repl

by _skel 4y ago

I suspect the initial negative take on the license change was correct, and this is the dying gasp of the company. It's just taking longer than expected to replace Docker Desktop. But I am seeing a lot of progress on Podman and Rancher and a few others, and some of the larger tech companies are also building in-house replacements. A lot of the people who had to scramble to find a replacement are not happy about it. In a year or two I think some of the companies that paid for licenses to avoid migrating are going to rethink their license costs, because the free alternatives will be just as good as Docker Desktop. Then we will see whether this revenue increase was sustainable or simply the transient result of holding customers hostage when they had no alternatives but to pay.

roughly 4y ago
What gets me about this is the math doesn't make any sense. Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the company (insurance, taxes, accounting, etc) is probably double that, but call it $250k/yr to be nice. You take 3 developers and have them spend a quarter on replacing Docker Desktop, that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year. Docker wants you to pay $10/mo to make your $20k/mo developer more effective, and companies in our industry would rather spend several months of developer time building an alternative that they'll have to support forever and teach every new individual coming into the company how to use. For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time.
- twblalock 4y ago
  If you do the same math for a company with thousands, or tens of thousands, of developers, the answer looks different. Large companies already have dedicated teams for stuff that is a lot less critical than the container runtime. The companies that are too big to avoid paying, but too small to build a replacement, are the ones that are in a jam -- for now. But in a year or two, Podman or Rancher might might fully meet their needs. What should they do then? Continue to pay for Docker, or use a free and open source alternative that has feature parity?
  - roughly 4y ago
    Ok, I'll do the math: $250k/yr/developer, so for 1 quarter, that's $62.5k, 3 developers for one quarter is $187.5k. Docker costs $10/mo, or $120/yr, so for 1000 developers, that's $120k/yr, or a payoff time of 1.5 years, assuming nobody ever has to touch anything ever again. Let's say our solution requires 1 developer-quarter per year to maintain - bugfixes, upgrades, deployments, etc. That's $62.5k/yr. That pushes our payoff time out to 2.5 years. Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in developer productivity of 1% (our solution has a bug that means things are slow for a day, developers can't google for easy answers, developers have to port things into our system) - that's a minute of extra work for every ~2hrs. That's 1000*250k*.01, or a net drain to the company of $2.5M/yr, which effectively pushes our payback time out to "never". Hell, we can even work the math the other way - for replacing Docker Desktop to be worthwhile, it's gotta cost less than $120/yr/developer. Developers cost $250k/yr, for call it 250 days of work per year, so $1000/day, or $125/hr, which means if the aggregate cost of our replacement to an individual user is even an hour per year, it wouldn't be worth doing for free. Add in the cost of actually having someone actually maintain our replacement product, and the math's even shittier.
    - vasco 4y ago
      A big mistake with this math is that globally developers are not paid anywhere close to 250k/yr even fully loaded for the company. In my country in Europe it's closer to 60k/yr fully loaded. There is cheaper. Also most companies aren't gonna build something from scratch, they are going to use something else that is also available. That being said this type of exercise is good to show because many managers do not do it.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - rpgmaker 4y ago
        Man they're really screwing developers over in Europe. That's what they earn in the third world.
- tester457 4y ago
  > For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time. Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about opportunity cost.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    And people (including developers) aren’t always rational actors that act logically. Rightly or wrongly, there is a sense of fairness at play when something that was once free is no longer free. People aren’t entitled to a free lunch, but once you have it, it’s hard to take it away. Things like this can make even the most logical people act counterintuitively.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- keewee7 4y ago
  This article from 2013 might give an indication on why some people choose FOSS even when they can afford the non-FOSS solutions: The licensing. My God, the licensing. It's not so much the money, as the infernal, mind-bending tax code level complexity involved in making sure all your software is properly licensed: determining what 'level' and 'edition' you are licensed at, who is licensed to use what, which servers are licensed... wait, what? Sorry, I passed out there for a minute when I was attacked by rabid licensing weasels. I'm not inclined to make grand pronouncements about the future of software, but if anything kills off commercial software, let me tell you, it won't be open source software. They needn't bother. Commercial software will gleefully strangle itself to death on its own licensing terms. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Note that the Cloud resolves licensing in that you can’t consume resources you’re not licensed for (although “uncapped cloud” lets you consume resources that you don’t know are paying for).
  - musicale 4y ago
    I concur. It just reduces friction and overhead. However license management and compliance might be easier if you go with apps from an app store like Apple/MS/Steam/etc..
  - Daub 4y ago
    Agreed. This effects everyone, event At a simple user level. We have access to Adobe Creative Cloud at uni. Every time I walk into a new classroom, I need to go through the creative cloud academicc licence dance. Sign in, sign out, sign in again, Singh out again la la la.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    Docket licensing is significantly simpler than that codinghorror outrage article. https://www.docker.com/pricing/ https://www.docker.com/pricing/
- ilyt 4y ago
  > that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year. the 250 person companies are not building the replacement, the 2k+ ones will. And likely ones that fit their internal architecture better so there are productivity gains to be had on top of that
  - dathinab 4y ago
    and they are also building replacements because it's beneficial for their business for various reasons
- HatchedLake721 4y ago
  Amen. This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. “Here’s a solution that will save you hours every month, it’s only $9 p/m.” “$9 p/m???” - asked a developer choking on their avocado toast “That’s the same price as Spotify! Meh, I can develop the same thing myself in 2 weeks.” 2 months later. "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."
  - paxys 4y ago
    > 2 months later. > "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m." That is wildly optimistic.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      > almost done The last 10% takes 90% of the time.
  - skywhopper 4y ago
    In my experience it’s not developers who balk at such fees. Management gets very nervous about every $5 and $10/month tool that folks want to use and regularly insists on trimming seats.
  - dijit 4y ago
    Its not devs buying these tools in a company context, and devs are not on universally high salaries. I made the point before that these little costs rack up quickly, I can speak to my costs: Gitlab: 19/m Docker: 24/m Slack: 12.5/m Copilot: 19/m Office: 12.5/m Tailscale: 15/m oslash: 6/mo pagerduty: 41/m Jira/Confluence: 26.25/m Calendly: 16/m Bonusly: 4.5/m Snyk: 98/m Figma: 42/m Lens: 20/m Postman: 29/m Sourcegraph: 99/m Jetbrains: 1xIDE: 23/m or: Jetbrains: All: 78/m This is obviously a non-exhaustive list, and isn’t the highest subscription tiers; its the first ones offering SSO, or that permit a mid-sized group. That doesnt take into account other specialised tools like Perforce (huge cost) or Teletrik: $1,299/y This also doesn't take into account that you sometimes need to buy seats in batches of 5, or if you have an overlap of people for even a day that then you must buy a license for the whole period. So there can easily be overages. So, $490~ is the minimum per seat cost in my org, (there are other licenses that I cant think about right now, including docusign for example, and it doesn't include perforce). That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  N employees, M internal tooling maintenance cost, Y for years. 120 * N * Y vs M * Y looks very attractive for large N and small M, esp when that 120 may suddenly increase without warning (again). It's still just math.
- dathinab 4y ago
  I think you are overestimating how much most developers world wide are payed. Something like $150k+/yr might be something you can get in silicon valley but outside of the US this level of payment is reserved to a small number of senior developer. Through that doesn't really change your arguments point. Through I also would argue that while some companies are tightly coupled to docker desktop many others are not (and can easily migrate) or need to migrate to other tooling for other non-payment reasons. If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1). (1): Through that is only on Linux and it's not a clear cut "this is better" but more a "subtle differences can make it much better but also worse depending on what you do/are looking for".
  - skissane 4y ago
    > If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1). > (1): Through that is only on Linux If you only need Docker CLI on Linux, the open source version of Docker works fine, so you don’t need any alternative to the proprietary licensed Docker The problem I saw firsthand in moving off Docker Desktop for Mac, is (last I checked) nothing else had as seamless networking and filesystem integration on Mac as Docker Desktop does. Funnily enough the Docker Desktop networking stuff is open source (VPNKit), but at the time nobody else seemed to have integrated it with the open source bits of Docker in a way which just worked. With Docker Desktop for Mac, our Gradle scripts which created Docker containers on the Linux CI infrastructure worked unchanged on macOS. We tried moving to minikube or podman and with both we lost that
  - coffee33go 4y ago
    > you are overestimating how much most developers world wide are payed. Something like $150k+/yr might be something you can get in silicon valley but o True. Also these $150k+/yr devs are the ones that eventually roll out the next opensource docker replacement...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  For my company which went from its internal hand rolled ticketing system to Jira, Azure, etc. the big issue is that our hand rolled system, even though it had limited features, was significantly more suited to our needs. It was much faster, had the exact fields we needed, and the exact workflow we wanted. It provided email alerts using the rules thst made sense for us and did I mention it was ridiculously faster? We went from a single developer probably spending a few weeks in a year to maintain/augment a ticketing system that worked really great for us, to paying hundreds of thousands for something that doesn’t work well at all.
  - kiratp 4y ago
    Sometimes it’s better to just change your workflow to match the tool if that avoids you having to build and maintain your own ticketing system
    - figassis 4y ago
      Problem with this is false advertising. Often, you buy a tool because its website says can do A and B, and do does the sales rep. Then you deploy it and realize it really only does C, and if you squint at it hard enough you can kinda see A and B if you pay extra and spend months customizing it. Growth at all costs mindset makes companies lie do they don’t lose a single lead, then try to lock/beat them into submission and pretend this was always the agreement.
    - supportlocal4h 4y ago
      Sure. You take the two ladies who built and maintain your homegrown system and you run them through 6 months of training on Actions and Pipelines and Agents along with two other employees, then give them a Director and an official dept like "DevOps". Now you're ready for a new workflow. See all the hassle and money you've saved?
  - tough 4y ago
    Capitalism winning, it's sufferers loosing. Just another day
- orf 4y ago
  It’s a bit different. The business pricing is 24 dollars a month, so with 150 employees you’re looking at 270,000 dollars a year for a MacOS desktop application. Nobody seriously cares about docker hub. Nobody cares about the SSO, or the access management, or SCIM. Nobody uses anything but the app that makes it simple to run stuff in MacOS. That’s not worth 270k a year.
  - sac2171 4y ago
    Is your math right?
    - Raidion 4y ago
      Nope. 24bucks x 150devs x 12months = 43,200. Which is a lot closer to reasonable if it can save you (@ $100 dev/hour) 2.88 hours of work per dev per year, then it's break even.
    - orf 4y ago
      Not at all, which serves me right for commenting when I should have been sleeping.
- SternenLuchs 4y ago
  just to fix a few assumptions as we are Migrating right now. we have roughly 160 developers, sso is a requirement so Business license it is. 160 x24 x12 = 46k + dealing with Budgets + sso Integration vs telling everyone to install colima, podman, whatever and replacing the commands. if you need 3 people to replace docker, I have no clue what you are doing.
- bruce511 4y ago
  The math doesn't make sense, and that's why Docker is both successful now, and why the parent comment to yours is flawed. Always bear in mind that when "the Internet" complains about some minor price issue, it's usually individuals who are responding. Individuals tend to have limited cash, and all decisions are cash. They are time rich and cash poor. They run Linux on the desktop over Windows to "save money". [1] Most companies though are cash rich and time poor. If they can outsource a task for small money then they will. Yes, there's a place where the outsource cost is too high, but that's really high. They run windows on the desktop because that saves time. They'll continue to use docker because switching costs a lot of time. So Docker will do just fine. Companies are more than happy to spend money. See AWS as exhibit A. [1] there are many reasons to use a Linux desktop, saving money is the least interesting.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  But I want it for free as in Twitter! They should make their revenue by phoning home with private data they can exploit for revenue like everyone else. They could be a $1B company if they sold code snippets to MS to train their code generators. Yes… that was sarcasm. Ten bucks a month for the value that Docker brings is a fantastic deal. I regularly see people pay much more for far less.
uberduper 4y ago
Large companies took a while to figure out their replacement options, pick one, validate tooling, etc. They paid up early but they aren't paying again. Rancher on mac is basically a drop in replacement. With WSL on windows, docker desktop was, I assume, already unnecessary. The linux users were probably running docker engine this whole time anyway.
nxmnxm99 4y ago
If $135m in 2 years is a dying breath then Jesus take the wheel
pico303 4y ago
I’m just getting really tired of people thinking good software should be free and all the expertise and hard work that goes into something like Docker isn’t worth paying for. Docker provides a ton of value for very little money. Why shouldn’t I, as someone who makes a living writing software, pay others for the same hard work they’re doing? If you can’t be bothered to pay for anything, why should anyone pay you for your software?
- wraptile 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - ebiester 4y ago
    Libre, not gratis. And I'm leaning toward a new philosophy of gratis for people not making money off the code, and paid for people who are. In many ways, the industry might be better off if the corporate software supply chain is professionalized. I think the right way to do this is AGPL + private licenses all the way down.
    - afiori 4y ago
      The x265 debacle shows that composing multiple paid licenses does not work very well.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  RMS must be crying and Bill Gates must be laughing his ass off right now at the FOSS movement doing a 180° on "free as in speech and free as in beer". I mean, proprietary software developers have been saying the same thing as the parent poster ever since the FOSS revolution started taking off in the '80s. Judging by the developer rhetoric, Gates & co. were right in the end and the chickens are starting to come home to roost for FOSS. "Vive la contre-révolution!" I suppose.
  - presentation 4y ago
    Seriously, 90% of the comments on HN when software companies decide to charge customers money is that the poster doesn’t want to spend any money on any software ever (but wants to receive billions of dollars building their own FOSS TODO list app) and that they’re the companies are oppressive and evil. What a relief (and time-saver for the support teams) it must be for companies like Docker to have those difficult users just self select themselves out.
debarshri 4y ago
Since getting into the world of startups and strategies, one thing I have realised is that there is nothing out there is the world that is truly free. If you are using a free product today, chance are you are paying it somewhere else in their eco system. Docker desktop used to be free. Lot of products are free initially, it could be because they need feedback, or they are trojan horse for another product in their ecosystem, or they want to win the market share and once competitor is decimated they can rake in money. So, never chase free stuff if you are an enterprise. Chase quality, value, operational efficiency.
ospider 4y ago
I'm a podman user, but I'm also a paid DockerHub user. Podman and docker's business model actually do not conflict, IMHO.

by _skel 4y ago

roughly 4y ago

What gets me about this is the math doesn't make any sense. Docker charges $10/developer/month. Those developers are paid $150k+/yr, fully loaded to the company (insurance, taxes, accounting, etc) is probably double that, but call it $250k/yr to be nice. You take 3 developers and have them spend a quarter on replacing Docker Desktop, that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year. Docker wants you to pay $10/mo to make your $20k/mo developer more effective, and companies in our industry would rather spend several months of developer time building an alternative that they'll have to support forever and teach every new individual coming into the company how to use. For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time.

twblalock 4y ago
If you do the same math for a company with thousands, or tens of thousands, of developers, the answer looks different. Large companies already have dedicated teams for stuff that is a lot less critical than the container runtime. The companies that are too big to avoid paying, but too small to build a replacement, are the ones that are in a jam -- for now. But in a year or two, Podman or Rancher might might fully meet their needs. What should they do then? Continue to pay for Docker, or use a free and open source alternative that has feature parity?
- roughly 4y ago
  Ok, I'll do the math: $250k/yr/developer, so for 1 quarter, that's $62.5k, 3 developers for one quarter is $187.5k. Docker costs $10/mo, or $120/yr, so for 1000 developers, that's $120k/yr, or a payoff time of 1.5 years, assuming nobody ever has to touch anything ever again. Let's say our solution requires 1 developer-quarter per year to maintain - bugfixes, upgrades, deployments, etc. That's $62.5k/yr. That pushes our payoff time out to 2.5 years. Let's say our solution causes a net decrease in developer productivity of 1% (our solution has a bug that means things are slow for a day, developers can't google for easy answers, developers have to port things into our system) - that's a minute of extra work for every ~2hrs. That's 1000*250k*.01, or a net drain to the company of $2.5M/yr, which effectively pushes our payback time out to "never". Hell, we can even work the math the other way - for replacing Docker Desktop to be worthwhile, it's gotta cost less than $120/yr/developer. Developers cost $250k/yr, for call it 250 days of work per year, so $1000/day, or $125/hr, which means if the aggregate cost of our replacement to an individual user is even an hour per year, it wouldn't be worth doing for free. Add in the cost of actually having someone actually maintain our replacement product, and the math's even shittier.
  - vasco 4y ago
    A big mistake with this math is that globally developers are not paid anywhere close to 250k/yr even fully loaded for the company. In my country in Europe it's closer to 60k/yr fully loaded. There is cheaper. Also most companies aren't gonna build something from scratch, they are going to use something else that is also available. That being said this type of exercise is good to show because many managers do not do it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - rpgmaker 4y ago
      Man they're really screwing developers over in Europe. That's what they earn in the third world.
tester457 4y ago
> For a group that seems to pride itself on math and logic and whatever, I don't understand what the hell we're thinking most of the time. Organizations are prone to bike shedding and forget about opportunity cost.
- mbreese 4y ago
  And people (including developers) aren’t always rational actors that act logically. Rightly or wrongly, there is a sense of fairness at play when something that was once free is no longer free. People aren’t entitled to a free lunch, but once you have it, it’s hard to take it away. Things like this can make even the most logical people act counterintuitively.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
keewee7 4y ago
This article from 2013 might give an indication on why some people choose FOSS even when they can afford the non-FOSS solutions: The licensing. My God, the licensing. It's not so much the money, as the infernal, mind-bending tax code level complexity involved in making sure all your software is properly licensed: determining what 'level' and 'edition' you are licensed at, who is licensed to use what, which servers are licensed... wait, what? Sorry, I passed out there for a minute when I was attacked by rabid licensing weasels. I'm not inclined to make grand pronouncements about the future of software, but if anything kills off commercial software, let me tell you, it won't be open source software. They needn't bother. Commercial software will gleefully strangle itself to death on its own licensing terms. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
- eastbound 4y ago
  Note that the Cloud resolves licensing in that you can’t consume resources you’re not licensed for (although “uncapped cloud” lets you consume resources that you don’t know are paying for).
- musicale 4y ago
  I concur. It just reduces friction and overhead. However license management and compliance might be easier if you go with apps from an app store like Apple/MS/Steam/etc..
- Daub 4y ago
  Agreed. This effects everyone, event At a simple user level. We have access to Adobe Creative Cloud at uni. Every time I walk into a new classroom, I need to go through the creative cloud academicc licence dance. Sign in, sign out, sign in again, Singh out again la la la.
- yunohn 4y ago
  Docket licensing is significantly simpler than that codinghorror outrage article. https://www.docker.com/pricing/ https://www.docker.com/pricing/
ilyt 4y ago
> that's nearly $200k in developer costs spent replacing a tool that's gonna cost your 250 person company $30k/year. the 250 person companies are not building the replacement, the 2k+ ones will. And likely ones that fit their internal architecture better so there are productivity gains to be had on top of that
- dathinab 4y ago
  and they are also building replacements because it's beneficial for their business for various reasons
HatchedLake721 4y ago
Amen. This is why I don’t want to sell to developers. “Here’s a solution that will save you hours every month, it’s only $9 p/m.” “$9 p/m???” - asked a developer choking on their avocado toast “That’s the same price as Spotify! Meh, I can develop the same thing myself in 2 weeks.” 2 months later. "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m."
- paxys 4y ago
  > 2 months later. > "Well, it's almost done. At least I won't be wasting $9 p/m." That is wildly optimistic.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    > almost done The last 10% takes 90% of the time.
- skywhopper 4y ago
  In my experience it’s not developers who balk at such fees. Management gets very nervous about every $5 and $10/month tool that folks want to use and regularly insists on trimming seats.
- dijit 4y ago
  Its not devs buying these tools in a company context, and devs are not on universally high salaries. I made the point before that these little costs rack up quickly, I can speak to my costs: Gitlab: 19/m Docker: 24/m Slack: 12.5/m Copilot: 19/m Office: 12.5/m Tailscale: 15/m oslash: 6/mo pagerduty: 41/m Jira/Confluence: 26.25/m Calendly: 16/m Bonusly: 4.5/m Snyk: 98/m Figma: 42/m Lens: 20/m Postman: 29/m Sourcegraph: 99/m Jetbrains: 1xIDE: 23/m or: Jetbrains: All: 78/m This is obviously a non-exhaustive list, and isn’t the highest subscription tiers; its the first ones offering SSO, or that permit a mid-sized group. That doesnt take into account other specialised tools like Perforce (huge cost) or Teletrik: $1,299/y This also doesn't take into account that you sometimes need to buy seats in batches of 5, or if you have an overlap of people for even a day that then you must buy a license for the whole period. So there can easily be overages. So, $490~ is the minimum per seat cost in my org, (there are other licenses that I cant think about right now, including docusign for example, and it doesn't include perforce). That already represents about 19% of a monthly take home salary for the median developer in Sweden.
jvanderbot 4y ago
N employees, M internal tooling maintenance cost, Y for years. 120 * N * Y vs M * Y looks very attractive for large N and small M, esp when that 120 may suddenly increase without warning (again). It's still just math.
dathinab 4y ago
I think you are overestimating how much most developers world wide are payed. Something like $150k+/yr might be something you can get in silicon valley but outside of the US this level of payment is reserved to a small number of senior developer. Through that doesn't really change your arguments point. Through I also would argue that while some companies are tightly coupled to docker desktop many others are not (and can easily migrate) or need to migrate to other tooling for other non-payment reasons. If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1). (1): Through that is only on Linux and it's not a clear cut "this is better" but more a "subtle differences can make it much better but also worse depending on what you do/are looking for".
- skissane 4y ago
  > If you only need containers (e.g. docker cli) but not docker desktop podman is already a drop in replacement in many case, one which in certain aspects is even much better to boost(*1). > (1): Through that is only on Linux If you only need Docker CLI on Linux, the open source version of Docker works fine, so you don’t need any alternative to the proprietary licensed Docker The problem I saw firsthand in moving off Docker Desktop for Mac, is (last I checked) nothing else had as seamless networking and filesystem integration on Mac as Docker Desktop does. Funnily enough the Docker Desktop networking stuff is open source (VPNKit), but at the time nobody else seemed to have integrated it with the open source bits of Docker in a way which just worked. With Docker Desktop for Mac, our Gradle scripts which created Docker containers on the Linux CI infrastructure worked unchanged on macOS. We tried moving to minikube or podman and with both we lost that
- coffee33go 4y ago
  > you are overestimating how much most developers world wide are payed. Something like $150k+/yr might be something you can get in silicon valley but o True. Also these $150k+/yr devs are the ones that eventually roll out the next opensource docker replacement...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rhaway84773 4y ago
For my company which went from its internal hand rolled ticketing system to Jira, Azure, etc. the big issue is that our hand rolled system, even though it had limited features, was significantly more suited to our needs. It was much faster, had the exact fields we needed, and the exact workflow we wanted. It provided email alerts using the rules thst made sense for us and did I mention it was ridiculously faster? We went from a single developer probably spending a few weeks in a year to maintain/augment a ticketing system that worked really great for us, to paying hundreds of thousands for something that doesn’t work well at all.
- kiratp 4y ago
  Sometimes it’s better to just change your workflow to match the tool if that avoids you having to build and maintain your own ticketing system
  - figassis 4y ago
    Problem with this is false advertising. Often, you buy a tool because its website says can do A and B, and do does the sales rep. Then you deploy it and realize it really only does C, and if you squint at it hard enough you can kinda see A and B if you pay extra and spend months customizing it. Growth at all costs mindset makes companies lie do they don’t lose a single lead, then try to lock/beat them into submission and pretend this was always the agreement.
  - supportlocal4h 4y ago
    Sure. You take the two ladies who built and maintain your homegrown system and you run them through 6 months of training on Actions and Pipelines and Agents along with two other employees, then give them a Director and an official dept like "DevOps". Now you're ready for a new workflow. See all the hassle and money you've saved?
- tough 4y ago
  Capitalism winning, it's sufferers loosing. Just another day
orf 4y ago
It’s a bit different. The business pricing is 24 dollars a month, so with 150 employees you’re looking at 270,000 dollars a year for a MacOS desktop application. Nobody seriously cares about docker hub. Nobody cares about the SSO, or the access management, or SCIM. Nobody uses anything but the app that makes it simple to run stuff in MacOS. That’s not worth 270k a year.
- sac2171 4y ago
  Is your math right?
  - Raidion 4y ago
    Nope. 24bucks x 150devs x 12months = 43,200. Which is a lot closer to reasonable if it can save you (@ $100 dev/hour) 2.88 hours of work per dev per year, then it's break even.
  - orf 4y ago
    Not at all, which serves me right for commenting when I should have been sleeping.
SternenLuchs 4y ago
just to fix a few assumptions as we are Migrating right now. we have roughly 160 developers, sso is a requirement so Business license it is. 160 x24 x12 = 46k + dealing with Budgets + sso Integration vs telling everyone to install colima, podman, whatever and replacing the commands. if you need 3 people to replace docker, I have no clue what you are doing.
bruce511 4y ago
The math doesn't make sense, and that's why Docker is both successful now, and why the parent comment to yours is flawed. Always bear in mind that when "the Internet" complains about some minor price issue, it's usually individuals who are responding. Individuals tend to have limited cash, and all decisions are cash. They are time rich and cash poor. They run Linux on the desktop over Windows to "save money". [1] Most companies though are cash rich and time poor. If they can outsource a task for small money then they will. Yes, there's a place where the outsource cost is too high, but that's really high. They run windows on the desktop because that saves time. They'll continue to use docker because switching costs a lot of time. So Docker will do just fine. Companies are more than happy to spend money. See AWS as exhibit A. [1] there are many reasons to use a Linux desktop, saving money is the least interesting.
berniedurfee 4y ago
But I want it for free as in Twitter! They should make their revenue by phoning home with private data they can exploit for revenue like everyone else. They could be a $1B company if they sold code snippets to MS to train their code generators. Yes… that was sarcasm. Ten bucks a month for the value that Docker brings is a fantastic deal. I regularly see people pay much more for far less.

uberduper 4y ago

Large companies took a while to figure out their replacement options, pick one, validate tooling, etc. They paid up early but they aren't paying again. Rancher on mac is basically a drop in replacement. With WSL on windows, docker desktop was, I assume, already unnecessary. The linux users were probably running docker engine this whole time anyway.

nxmnxm99 4y ago

If $135m in 2 years is a dying breath then Jesus take the wheel

pico303 4y ago

I’m just getting really tired of people thinking good software should be free and all the expertise and hard work that goes into something like Docker isn’t worth paying for. Docker provides a ton of value for very little money. Why shouldn’t I, as someone who makes a living writing software, pay others for the same hard work they’re doing? If you can’t be bothered to pay for anything, why should anyone pay you for your software?

wraptile 4y ago
[flagged]
- ebiester 4y ago
  Libre, not gratis. And I'm leaning toward a new philosophy of gratis for people not making money off the code, and paid for people who are. In many ways, the industry might be better off if the corporate software supply chain is professionalized. I think the right way to do this is AGPL + private licenses all the way down.
  - afiori 4y ago
    The x265 debacle shows that composing multiple paid licenses does not work very well.
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
RMS must be crying and Bill Gates must be laughing his ass off right now at the FOSS movement doing a 180° on "free as in speech and free as in beer". I mean, proprietary software developers have been saying the same thing as the parent poster ever since the FOSS revolution started taking off in the '80s. Judging by the developer rhetoric, Gates & co. were right in the end and the chickens are starting to come home to roost for FOSS. "Vive la contre-révolution!" I suppose.
- presentation 4y ago
  Seriously, 90% of the comments on HN when software companies decide to charge customers money is that the poster doesn’t want to spend any money on any software ever (but wants to receive billions of dollars building their own FOSS TODO list app) and that they’re the companies are oppressive and evil. What a relief (and time-saver for the support teams) it must be for companies like Docker to have those difficult users just self select themselves out.

debarshri 4y ago

Since getting into the world of startups and strategies, one thing I have realised is that there is nothing out there is the world that is truly free. If you are using a free product today, chance are you are paying it somewhere else in their eco system. Docker desktop used to be free. Lot of products are free initially, it could be because they need feedback, or they are trojan horse for another product in their ecosystem, or they want to win the market share and once competitor is decimated they can rake in money. So, never chase free stuff if you are an enterprise. Chase quality, value, operational efficiency.

ospider 4y ago

I'm a podman user, but I'm also a paid DockerHub user. Podman and docker's business model actually do not conflict, IMHO.