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Without entering into the specifics of this situation, I don’t understand the hate for Docker the company. They are providing a huge service for the community a

Without entering into the specifics of this situation, I don’t understand the hate for Docker the company. They are providing a huge service for the community and looking for ways to make money from it to make it sustainable. I would give them a bit more empathy/benefit of the doubt as they iterate on their approach. Somewhere, somehow, someone has to pay for that storage and bandwidth whether directly or indirectly (I am old enough to remember what happened with sourceforge so I rather them find a model that works for everyone)

HelloNurse 4y ago
If you inconvenience all users (by devastating the "ecosystem" of publicly available images) in order to extort money from a few users (some organizations will pay up, at least temporarily) you should expect hate. The only benefit of doubt Docker deserves is on a psychological plane: evil or stupid?
NineStarPoint 4y ago
It’s a long standing hate for me that isn’t limited to just Docker, companies that used “we’re free” to obtain massive growth only to turn around and switch monetization models completely once they’ve become the dominant player in the market. It’s a massive distortion on the market, driving companies that tried to be fiscally sound from the start into irrelevancy while extremely inefficient ventures become the market leaders on account of superior funding. Or to put it another way, Docker should have been focused on sustainability from the start and not dangled a price they knew couldn’t last in front of people to increase adoption.
armchairhacker 4y ago
I agree they deserve to get paid, but there are better ways than essentially holding customers’ data and URLs hostage. The problem is they are trying to extract money from other open-source developers who are at least as cash-strapped as them. Plus, I doubt they will get many people to actually start paying. People will simply move to other storage (like Github) and switch the URLs. Docker is fully open-source and works without docker.io, they don’t really have a position here except owning the name. IMO they just need to edit / clarify that open-source developers and organizations won’t need to pay, only those who presumably should have the funds. And take a more passive stance: bug people with annoying messages like Wikipedia does, and threaten shutting down docker.io altogether if they don’t somehow get funding (some people will complain about this too but more will understand and will be sympathetic). Wikimedia, Unix/Linux, Mozilla, etc. as well as Homebrew/cURL/Rust all seem to be doing fine as nonprofits without creating huge controversies like this.

HelloNurse 4y ago

If you inconvenience all users (by devastating the "ecosystem" of publicly available images) in order to extort money from a few users (some organizations will pay up, at least temporarily) you should expect hate. The only benefit of doubt Docker deserves is on a psychological plane: evil or stupid?

NineStarPoint 4y ago

It’s a long standing hate for me that isn’t limited to just Docker, companies that used “we’re free” to obtain massive growth only to turn around and switch monetization models completely once they’ve become the dominant player in the market. It’s a massive distortion on the market, driving companies that tried to be fiscally sound from the start into irrelevancy while extremely inefficient ventures become the market leaders on account of superior funding. Or to put it another way, Docker should have been focused on sustainability from the start and not dangled a price they knew couldn’t last in front of people to increase adoption.

armchairhacker 4y ago

I agree they deserve to get paid, but there are better ways than essentially holding customers’ data and URLs hostage. The problem is they are trying to extract money from other open-source developers who are at least as cash-strapped as them. Plus, I doubt they will get many people to actually start paying. People will simply move to other storage (like Github) and switch the URLs. Docker is fully open-source and works without docker.io, they don’t really have a position here except owning the name. IMO they just need to edit / clarify that open-source developers and organizations won’t need to pay, only those who presumably should have the funds. And take a more passive stance: bug people with annoying messages like Wikipedia does, and threaten shutting down docker.io altogether if they don’t somehow get funding (some people will complain about this too but more will understand and will be sympathetic). Wikimedia, Unix/Linux, Mozilla, etc. as well as Homebrew/cURL/Rust all seem to be doing fine as nonprofits without creating huge controversies like this.