4 ms·
> Here is a quick exercise: imagine I announce the next Elixir versions will require at least $300/year to use. I bet everyone would be fine with it. The cost o
by nickjj 4y ago
> Here is a quick exercise: imagine I announce the next Elixir versions will require at least $300/year to use. I bet everyone would be fine with it. The cost of running a business and all that, right?
That's not a fair analogy.
Docker is still free to use to build your own things today. You can run containers on your servers and pay $0. You can host images on your own registry and Docker makes $0 off that, you can still provide free value to the community by allowing the community to pull from your registry at no cost.
An accurate analogy would be more like Elixir officially hosting all open source Elixir apps for free for ~10 years and now 10 years later you want to start charging a relatively small amount of money to continue hosting things for the community. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me and that's what Docker is doing here.
- josevalim 4y agoThe analogy worked fine under the last sentence of your previous comment - now removed - which said something like "assume nothing is given, assume nothing is owned". Anyway, we can work with your example. Your example is missing the context that Docker images are not always used as an app, but also as a building block. So let's change the exercise slightly: assume Dashbit owns Hex.pm and posting any package to Hex.pm now requires $300/year or packages will be removed within a month. As an OSS maintainer, if you do not pay, you will break the deployment of all users of your package. So... would everyone still be fine with it? The cost of running a business and all that? EDIT: Hex.pm supports custom registries which anyone can self-host. Including built-in tools to help you with that. You can apply this exercise to any open source community with a centralized-by-default package manager with custom registries (which, afaik, are most of them).