11 ms·

We’re no longer sunsetting the free team plan

370 points by 2bluesc 4y ago

genmud 4y ago
Read: We won't do it today or next week, since we got a bunch of negative publicity, but don't actually address why they didn't catch that it was a terrible policy. They describe that they have come to the light and now realize the policy was bad, as well as the communication around it, but don't describe how they are actually going to address this fundamental misalignment with their userbase and out-of touch decision making.
- cpuguy83 4y ago
  No business should ever build their business on the free tier of some other business. Ever. The change in position in this blog post does not change that. The change that precipitated this blog post also does not change that.
  - donmcronald 4y ago
    I agree, but there's some nuance to it. I self-host 100% of my dev environment and tools. I don't care too much about getting services from Docker Hub, regardless of whether it's free or paid. However, I do care about my namespaces and I don't want someone acting as if they're me, even if it's innocent and unintentional. Because of that I feel like I'm forced to deal with services like Docker Hub. It's a net negative for me to begin with, because I have to take the time to register an account, but it gets really awful if everyone starts asking for money to simply own a namespace. On the Docker Hub side, there can't be much cost in letting me hold my namespace and, because I've got my preferred namespace there, it makes it low friction to check them out as the first option if I ever need reliable image hosting that scales. There's some reciprocal benefit IMO. In principal I should probably be paying them something because all of my self-hosted stuff runs on Docker.
    - cpuguy83 4y ago
      But you don't need a team account to squat a namespace. Username and email are totally separate.
      - donmcronald 4y ago
        True, but I always use a team or an organization if it’s an option because it feels more correct to me if the namespace is transferable. If a dedicated user account is the only option I’ll take it. Ex: Docker offered to convert namespaces to normal accounts which I would have been happy with.
- caturopath 4y ago
  You have to take the W sometimes.
  - genmud 4y ago
    If they don't change the way they make decisions, its only a slight delay... not a Win. A win would be a commitment to never do this again (ideally), or put in something that binds them to provide <x> amount of notice.
    - Osiris 4y ago
      No company will ever say they will never do something in the future like that because the future is unknowable and who knows what circumstances will come up. What we can hope for is they learned something from this so when a hard decision like this must be made they’ll use a different approach.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    Is this really a W? It seems more like a stay of execution.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      Stay of execution is a W. We all due someday.
    - donmcronald 4y ago
      I think this is a big W. As soon as one company gets away with leveraging namespaces to extort money the flood gates will open and everyone is going to have their hand out asking you to pay just to maintain a consistent identity across platforms. It's time to make sure you've got trademarks on your namespaces IMO (if possible). At least that gives the upside of being able to make legal demands to companies that don't do enough to prevent impersonation and namespace squatting.
- Quekid5 4y ago
  At least we know that we're on borrowed time and maybe the wider ecosystem can come up with a decent (distributed, even?) alternative instead of everybody panicking and just moving toward another rug-pull.
  - rc_mob 4y ago
    Yup. Its still happening even if delayed a year or two and obfuscated by some complications.
- twblalock 4y ago
  It's incredibly tiresome that the first post on HN whenever a company does a press release is going to be from someone who will never be happy no matter what was said. "What does take responsibility mean?" "This is just PR fluff". "They are just saving face." Criticism of good things because the poster didn't like the motivation. Stuff like that. Did you really think the company was going to bare their soul to you like you were their psychiatrist or their priest? Do you think you are even entitled to that? Commenting about whether or not this is a good decision is valuable. Complaining about the content of PR fluff is not.
  - ljm 4y ago
    Cynicism is cheap
  - genmud 4y ago
    These decisions should never have seen the light of day, let alone a policy that was communicated in the way they did. Why should we cheer on PR and product folks trying to break their fucking arms patting themselves on the back for walking back an incredibly disruptive, short sighted and user-hostile decision?
    - PUSH_AX 4y ago
      Because A) of all the permutations of follow up decisions that could have been made, this falls on the "good choice" side, and B) this isn't "pat on the back" situation, this is a save face situation.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    It’s no more or less tiresome than a press release is itself. Whatever the material contents, a press release has “positivity” set to 1.0 (or as close to 1.0 as permitted by law and professional standards). This upsets the balance of the world, and that balance can be restored by submitting a reply with “positivity” set to 0.0 (or as close to 0.0 as permitted by law and standards of etiquette). Analogous to “someone who will never be happy no matter what was said”, the tone of the press release will always be happy no matter what they have to say. It seems very natural - almost inevitable, even - that someone will reply to an artificially max-positive document with an artificially max-negative comment. (Personally, I made peace with the tiresome nature of both press releases and critical replies by viewing it as an informal application of Laplace’s Rule - add one success and one failure to the total count to more accurately estimate the real underlying probability. The press release presents one observation guaranteed to be as positive as possible, and the inevitable critical reply presents another observation guaranteed to be as negative as possible, so with those two in hand you can look at other observations and get a better final estimation.)
- dymk 4y ago
  Negative generic FUD
- wefarrell 4y ago
  Yup, this should be addressed with the same level of detail and transparency as a postmortem for a technical failure. What were the multiple points of failure that led to this decision and how are they altering their operations from preventing something like this from happening again? Without deep transparency they will lose trust.
- nerdjon 4y ago
  100% this. If this wasn’t Docker’s first time making a bad decision maybe I would think that this decision is on hold indefinitely. But it isn’t and they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. I will be continuing with my original plan of communicating ideally not using DockerHub internally and making every effort remove our reliance off of it.
- burnished 4y ago
  >After listening to feedback and consulting our community, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision in sunsetting our Free Team plan. Last week we felt our communications were terrible but our policy was sound. It’s now clear that both the communications and the policy were wrong, so we’re reversing course and no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan Seriously, what else do you want? This kind of pointless whinging is just noise. They flat out said they were wrong in the first place.
  - genmud 4y ago
    I have already stated what I want, but I’ll spell it out 1) transparency into who was responsible for this decision 2) how exactly this decision was made and how they came to the conclusion that it was sound policy 3) how they are going to prevent these decisions that are disruptive, user-hostile and short sighted in the future 4) some degree of commitment they won’t sunset this in the future when people aren’t as upset
fariszr 4y ago
Too late for me personally. Already deleted accounts of my projects and switched to GHCR/Quay.io with a custom domain redirect [1] to avoid this happening again. GitHub is really living up to its reputation of being the open source hub. 1. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/docker-image-registry-facade/ https://httptoolkit.com/blog/docker-image-registry-facade/
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  Just remember who owns Github. EEE.
  - fariszr 4y ago
    That's why I did setup the custom link redirect, i can easily migrate at any time!
  - TavsiE9s 4y ago
    They might start charging for it but heck Microsoft still supports running VB6 applications on modern Windows. Not a fanboy by any measure but killing projects and products left, right, and centre isn't something they usually do.
    - benatkin 4y ago
      Yes, but what about VB6 itself? "Where can I install/buy Visual Basic 6?" https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/49c35ab3-ead2-43d1-9fa8-69aa277a8d9c/where-can-i-installbuy-visual-basic-6?forum=vssetup https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/49c35ab...
      - _gabe_ 4y ago
        There's nothing wrong with no longer wanting to distribute a 25 year old application that you no longer support development tools for. However your comment is completely disingenuous. One of the first links I ran into was a massive support article from Microsoft about how they will still allow VB6 applications to run on Windows and gave detailed instructions/tools on upgrading a Visual Basic project so you can continue development and don't lose all the work. > While the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported, Microsoft's goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications continue to run on supported Windows versions. The resources available from this page should help you as you maintain existing applications, and as you migrate your functionality to .NET.[0] This is much better support than other companies provide for discontinued platforms. Do you personally want to be on the hook for a version of your software you wrote/released 25 years ago? Especially if you've released what you consider to be improved upgrades of the software? Would you even be willing to help users upgrade from your 25 year old software? If the answer to any of those is no, then you're providing a very skewed perspective on what reasonable support for a product looks like. And once again, Microsoft is still writing articles 20 years after the initial release to help users upgrade. For all the bad crap Microsoft does, completely abandoning widely used frameworks is not one of them. [0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/visual-basic-6/visual-basic-6.0-documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...
onedr0p 4y ago
I still refuse to use Dockerhub and I cannot wait for Podman (and building multiarch containers) on Mac to get better so I can absolutely ditch anything Docker Inc or anything Mirantis touches all together. These are two companies I will NEVER trust again and will use whatever power I have to convince others to do the same.
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  Are Red Hat / IBM better?
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    Probably not better in so far as they're also trying to make a buck. But IBM has pretty deep pockets - the kind where they could feasibly write off the bandwidth of a container image registry as a goodwill gesture and not bat an eye. Same with GitHub/Microsoft. From recently history, the same cannot be said about Docker the company.
  - rc_mob 4y ago
    Pure gut feeling from having to work with employees from both companies, but yes. I feel like RedHat people care more about open source toooling.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    Experienced sell-support-for-open-source business conservatively funneling enterprises into its support network vs increasingly desperate VC money young-ish startup doing things without being able to predict consequences.
- victorgama 4y ago
  Same! Can't wait to just get rid of it completely. Red Hat also hosted Container Plumbing Days this week and was pretty good! Looking forward to what they will do with Podman (specially on macOS)
atlgator 4y ago
Too late. We already ditched Docker for Podman. It was a lot easier than I expected.
- berkle4455 4y ago
  But most projects are still published to dockerhub aren't they? Or was this only for hosting of your own private images?
  - verdverm 4y ago
    This was about public images for free docker organizations (teams), used by many open source projects for branding / naming consistency. I maintain one of the projects which moved to ghcr.io and have no interest in moving back, only further away. They have shown their hand and can no longer be trusted as good stewards or ecosystem participants imo
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  How does switching to Podman mitigate the problem of container image hosting that people were upset about?
  - rc_mob 4y ago
    lol true. but redhat does offe quay.io which is fine
    - wankle 4y ago
      It's starting to feel like Red Hat people are the ones amp'ing all this up.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    [dead]
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  You do realize that you moving away is actually a win for Dockerhub, right? Whole point of removing the free plan wasn't to squeeze money out from you, but to make you pay for the free storage and bandwidth. If you don't take up that free storage and bandwidth that is literally the same as removing your free plan. I don't know how podman does container storing, but if everyone moves over you probably shouldn't expect them to have free tier forever. EDIT: I would love to hear your counter arguments since you are downvoting. Why am I wrong?
gosukiwi 4y ago
... for now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yieldcrv 4y ago
“enough people switched away such that it’s no longer a burden, but we also lost a bunch of other users too”
codeptualize 4y ago
With these things I always wonder how many people they ignored to push this through. I am pretty sure there are plenty of people at Docker who 100% accurately predicted this, spoke up about it, and got ignored.
hughw 4y ago
Well, thank you, Docker.
nrclark 4y ago
Docker, Inc. is in a tricky position. They've raised a lot of capital, and continue to raise capital. According to Wikipedia, they took $105 million from Bain Capital in November of last year. So Docker, Inc has Mirantis on one side, and a whole bunch of VC on the other side. I'm sure that Docker Hub is expensive to run, and the core Docker app isn't free to maintain either. This TOS change was a fiasco, and absolutely didn't succeed in doing anything other than losing a lot of community goodwill. But I do understand why they're trying to squeeze some money out of Docker Hub. I'd be surprised if it's even break-even for them right now, and VC funds aren't exactly known for their acts of charity.
- GordonS 4y ago
  I get what you are saying, but I gave little sympathy for their situation - they used the VC tactic of "give it away to gain and monopolise the market, then do the old switcheroo once we're #1", so they had to know what was coming.
  - jolux 4y ago
    Not really what happened — they planned to build a cloud platform on top of it and probably subsidize Docker Hub using those profits. But they got their lunch ate by Kubernetes.
    - coding123 4y ago
      Which is crappy, because while I use k8s, it's actually poorly written, half baked and kinda non-portable. The fact that it depends on ELB when you use it at Amazon (just to extract more money), is super sad. Docker Swarm was a pure technology that didn't have such shitty half thought-out dependencies.
      - belthesar 4y ago
        Personal thoughts and feelings about k8s aside, please don't conflate the requirements of EKS, Amazon's managed k8s offering of which they are fit to do what they do best and tightly knit their own products to come up with a solution, with k8s as a whole. You're perfectly welcome to deploy your own k8s with static IPs for ingress to nginx if you'd like on AWS, as you can anywhere.
codeptualize 4y ago
You can not be the main player and betray the trust of your users (free or not). It's easy to forget the value of being an important part of a community that makes decisions on millions of $$$ in software spending, but be sure that there are plenty of companies who would love to take your place. Reverting this incredibly dumb decision is the right course of action but there is a long way ahead to restore trust.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Betray trust? They had a generous free tier for a long time. It cannot last forever. Perhaps it was predatory pricing. Even so, my takeaway is folks shouldn't bet on any one service being free forever.
  - palata 4y ago
    Maybe not bet on the service being free forever, but 30 days is not a lot of time to migrate away if you can't afford the new pricing...
  - codeptualize 4y ago
    I'm not saying they have the obligation to keep the free tier, but don't expect people to stick around. Also free plans can definitely last, best example being Github. If Github would cut off free open source repos it would be over, and I'm pretty sure they are very aware of that. My point is, it's a mistake to assume people will pay for something that was free and it's a misunderstanding to think there is no symbiotic relationship. Hosting a giant community can be incredibly valuable, especially when it's tech people with big budgets in your sector. It's imo a business mistake to monetize in a way that goes against that. The community will have no issue finding a new home that does appreciate them (e.g. Github).
  - theamk 4y ago
    Here is how you stop free service without betraying trust: First, lock creation of new free accounts. Then announce that: - After a long time (at least a year), newer images won't be accepted on free plan and after even longer time, existing images would be deleted. - After a long time (at least a year), free plan images would be deleted, starting with least used first. - Downloads from free accounts are heavily throttled. Speed becomes even slower the more stuff that IP downloads. The full speed is restored if either account owner or downloader have paid accounts - In a few months, accounts get a quota, and you only get 10 downloads/hour for free. Everyone else gets an error message and have to try again in an hour. ... see? So many way to wind it down without having everyone freak out. Docker has really flubbed that decision.
tommica 4y ago
I hope the team can figure out how to monetize their stuff and keep rolling forward - their tech is amazing!
iamleppert 4y ago
They didn't know their place, and still don't -- clearly. Dockerhub has very little to offer (basically hanging on by a thread) and doesn't deliver enough value to justify an expense for what was always claimed to be a free service. If you give something away for free, it better be just a starting point, for you to figure out how you're going to add enough value to justify people paying you. And then -- make your case and tell them why. Docker didn't do any of this. They literally tried to take a free product and just start charging for it. It feels the same as a restaurant who gave free toothpicks away suddenly want to start charging for them. This speaks to how out of touch their senior leadership is, and the only possible thing they can do to recover is to part ways with the leaders who made that terrible business decision. I've been in meetings like this before -- some analyst runs a SQL query and makes the case for charging for something that has always been free, and hamstrung leadership goes along with it because it sounds like such an easy way to "unlock value". What they really mean, is, easy way to make money off unsuspecting people via something that should probably be illegal, and would be in a different context (i.e. bait and switch).
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  Yep, the path to monetization is always adding new value-adds, not trying to charge for the current functionality after the fact.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    This assumes one knows how scalable such a generous free offering will be forever, on day one. Much more likely they were basically dumping to undercut the competition and gain market share. Though I suppose some startups are genuinely naive enough to just launch and hope they'll find a revenue stream rich enough later.
  - brookst 4y ago
    So if someone underpriced today, they are obligated to give it to you for less forever?
    - 4y ago
markus_zhang 4y ago
I'm curious, are they profitable? Docker is a super popular tool and I thought whoever has been there from the beginning should have 7 digits in their accounts.
- mkl95 4y ago
  Their ARR is over 50M, and they have raised $400M+ over the years. I wonder how much of that they have burnt.
john-tells-all 4y ago
My applause to Alex Ellis for writing a clear, direct call to arms! Their work is super useful and interesting. I've added them to my list of sponsorships: https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis
- tremon 4y ago
  You might want to add that that's the author of the previous post calling attention to this policy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35166317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35166317), because without knowing that information your post reads like a spam comment that has nothing to do with this story.
  - alexellisuk 4y ago
    Hey - it's Alex here. Someone sent me a link to the parent comment. Thank you John - for the support. Tremon - I get it - Hacker News users are super sceptical and fastidious. Here's a link to the "call to arms" as John calls it: https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-images/ https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-ima... Alex
mkl95 4y ago
Sounds desperate. Maybe a large chunk of users left in the last few days.
mnau 4y ago
I get that images costs money to host, but they could instead add a new feature that would spread out the costs (~bittorrent), while the hub would be the seed of last resort. VC capital wants its money back I guess.
thatwasunusual 4y ago
Who still use Docker, and not just the tool?
- rc_mob 4y ago
  Hello guy who does not have the same needs as me. I do. I use docker a lot. It saves me tons of headache.
wildmXranat 4y ago
Well. So what's the plan then? If they were doing this to create more revenue and limit spend, then will they be trouble down the line?
chrismarlow9 4y ago
At this point they just should have kept going. Doing what they did is a all in move, backtracking just makes it worse.
ericb 4y ago
I'm impressed. I do think this is a smart business move. You don't want to trade being "the place" for Docker for being "one, slightly more profitable place among many." MBA CEO: We beat earnings estimates this quarter by more than 100 golden eggs, via our sale of the goose that lays golden eggs.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Can someone explain this to me since I don't really use docker so all this feels weird to me? It would appear the entity provides oft-used service. Did they overstep on price or the suddenness of the announcement or some other combination I am not seeing? Did they promise it will be free forever?
- palata 4y ago
  My issue with it, for open source projects, was that it was not really clear what exactly would happen, and then my understanding of what would happen did not please me at all. My understanding was that I had 30 days to migrate my projects away (or pay, but for many open source projects there is no money). If I did nothing, I would lose access to my images on their registry, but the image would stay (and rot) there, which is even worse than the image being removed.
- cpuguy83 4y ago
  > Did they promise it will be free forever? No, unless having a free tier means forever. Docker announced they would end the free "teams" tier and that people would need to migrate to a paid plan to retain their teams. The communication was rocky and non-specific as to the details of the impact and only gave a 30-day notice. They quickly (next day or two?) followed up to give more specifics as to what that means (and doesn't mean). Now a couple of days after that they are pulling back on it completely due to backlash. Probably they could have gotten away with extending the time-frame... I'm not sure why anyone would think 30 days would be ok, but I suppose it is the free tier.
- gpm 4y ago
  From my perspective a large part of the issue is that they were trying to charge the wrong people. What they needed to do was figure out some way to make the people using dockerhub to build things to pay. What they attempted to do was charge people making it possible for other people to build things off of dockerhub. This meant that a lot of projects providing free services to docker were going to walk. For example why would the curl project upload curl images if it was going to cost them money? The people benefiting from those uploads were the people downloading the images, dockers customers (some already paying), not the curl project. (Curl is famous enough that docker wasn't going to charge them, but there are lots of less famous similar projects that they were trying to charge). Moreover these were frequently open source projects, which are very cost adverse by nature, and who you want to be seen as supporting not exploiting. What docker really needs to figure out is a way to charge companies downloading images, not people uploading them. Given how their service works, I have no clue how they manage that.
wg0 4y ago
There's no way out of it. Investors want their investment back and docker at this point is just a registry that otherwise anyone can deploy backed with some object storage or use any of other dozens out there. No other big player willing or interested to buy it either.
victorgama 4y ago
To be honest I'm not sure which move was worse: They announcing they would be sunsetting, or they going back on the decision after the backlash. I feel like the trust was already lost after the initial decision; there's no going back after that.
- majewsky 4y ago
  You forgot the part in the middle where they tried to gaslight everyone about what kind of sunset was announced.
rcarmo 4y ago
Well, too late. I whipped up a simple GitHub workflow in around 15m and am using it (with slight variations) on all my images to push them to ghcr.io: https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-handbrake/blob/master/.github/workflows/deploy.yml https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-handbrake/blob/master/.gith... Multi-platform builds are trickier, but essentially the same.
- alexellisuk 4y ago
  Multi-arch builds are easy to "transfer" IMHO crane cp docker.io/openfaas/gateway:0.10.0 ghcr.io/openfaas/gateway:0.10.0 If you've not used it yet - do take a look. Crane doesn't pull the images into a local Docker library for re-tagging and re-pushing. https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/blob/main/cmd/crane/doc/crane.md https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/blob/main/cmd...
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    Nice. The issue I have with some of my multi-arch stuff is that I began doing it before buildx stabilised, and I also launched multiple runners in parallel because some of the builds take... a long time.
cmer 4y ago
Docker is awesome tech but a terrible company with a terrible business model. I don’t see them surviving long term. Especially with the way they operate and alienate people.
djbusby 4y ago
When this all went down I was looking to move to some type of proxy for their hub, like I do for other tools (aka: mirror). My mirrors for CPAN, NPM, Packagist, Go and Debian were all (mostly) trivial to configure and use. Docker not so much. Still working to figure out how to route both search and pull to use our mirror. That it's hard to mirror feels like it's even more important to mirror. A rug pull never happens at a good time and makes it's occurrence more expensive than a planned event.
nine_k 4y ago
I hope they called it Project Joshua internally.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Makes me laugh! So many issues (not just this) because no one wants to pay for an FTP server and write some FTP commands, secure of course. And the VC companies make something say a tiny but more convenient but then pull the rug.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Haha! Victory! Suddenly they realize that people will go their own way rather then be strong armed, all their work writing themselves in as the center of the docker universe was about to go poof. I’m pretty sure it’s their destiny to be usurped but they’ve bought some time to become useful or find a way to lock people in to their platform. Now is the time for everyone to find an alternate means to share their docker images.
emocin 4y ago
“Oops! All angry users”
RyeCombinator 4y ago
[flagged]
zx8080 4y ago
What if it changes tomorrow? I'm moving even personal projects to a private repo and gonna build the base image or two myself, just in case someone's investor wants to step on the gas and milk me some moneys. Having some personal infra is not a big deal. It's actually getting easier, if not legshooting with overcomplexity.
ltbarcly3 4y ago
If you weren't planning on switching because of the for-cost team plan, you really should switch now. If Docker can't charge for their software at all without having so many people migrate away that they have to reverse the decision, then they are not a viable commercial entity and will randomly disappear in 1 or 3 or 5 years, probably when it is very inconvenient and you haven't prepared for it.
jaimex2 4y ago
Is there a CO2 leak in that office or something?
dajonker 4y ago
If they want to make money, they should stop listening to the community and start asking themselves "What would Oracle do?" I think a lot of companies would not really be capable to setup an alternative in time and would just have to start paying instead. Which would not be a bad thing. The opportunity cost of switching might be higher than just paying Docker for their services.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  Oracle would've charged per core and per GB of ram and number of containers to license your docker install. Free would allow 3 containers, on single core and 512MB ram. Sales people would be calling everyday to upgrade to docker pro, which is $120 per month/per user that will allow you to self host your registry, on premises or Managed Oracle cloud (vms and bandwidth extra). Ran docker run without a valid license? Prepare to be sued.
jakobnissen 4y ago
Ooiooiooooioooioiiioooook oooooioooo og en del oooi i oooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooo
deafpolygon 4y ago
Docker needs to pivot and change their business model to non-profit foundation. You can't charge for something that's already free, it makes no sense.
voytec 4y ago
They won't regain people's trust and confidence in them (as a company) fast.
ouraf 4y ago
maybe they can use the expenses maintaining docker images of projects that are beneficial to a broader FOSS user community to pay less taxes or something, or brag about their phylantropy on accounting reports. I don't believe the revenue from these avenues would save or kill the company anyway, so better make a lemonade of these lemons, right?

370 points by 2bluesc 4y ago

Read: We won't do it today or next week, since we got a bunch of negative publicity, but don't actually address why they didn't catch that it was a terrible policy. They describe that they have come to the light and now realize the policy was bad, as well as the communication around it, but don't describe how they are actually going to address this fundamental misalignment with their userbase and out-of touch decision making.

cpuguy83 4y ago
No business should ever build their business on the free tier of some other business. Ever. The change in position in this blog post does not change that. The change that precipitated this blog post also does not change that.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  I agree, but there's some nuance to it. I self-host 100% of my dev environment and tools. I don't care too much about getting services from Docker Hub, regardless of whether it's free or paid. However, I do care about my namespaces and I don't want someone acting as if they're me, even if it's innocent and unintentional. Because of that I feel like I'm forced to deal with services like Docker Hub. It's a net negative for me to begin with, because I have to take the time to register an account, but it gets really awful if everyone starts asking for money to simply own a namespace. On the Docker Hub side, there can't be much cost in letting me hold my namespace and, because I've got my preferred namespace there, it makes it low friction to check them out as the first option if I ever need reliable image hosting that scales. There's some reciprocal benefit IMO. In principal I should probably be paying them something because all of my self-hosted stuff runs on Docker.
  - cpuguy83 4y ago
    But you don't need a team account to squat a namespace. Username and email are totally separate.
    - donmcronald 4y ago
      True, but I always use a team or an organization if it’s an option because it feels more correct to me if the namespace is transferable. If a dedicated user account is the only option I’ll take it. Ex: Docker offered to convert namespaces to normal accounts which I would have been happy with.
caturopath 4y ago
You have to take the W sometimes.
- genmud 4y ago
  If they don't change the way they make decisions, its only a slight delay... not a Win. A win would be a commitment to never do this again (ideally), or put in something that binds them to provide <x> amount of notice.
  - Osiris 4y ago
    No company will ever say they will never do something in the future like that because the future is unknowable and who knows what circumstances will come up. What we can hope for is they learned something from this so when a hard decision like this must be made they’ll use a different approach.
- Kalium 4y ago
  Is this really a W? It seems more like a stay of execution.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    Stay of execution is a W. We all due someday.
  - donmcronald 4y ago
    I think this is a big W. As soon as one company gets away with leveraging namespaces to extort money the flood gates will open and everyone is going to have their hand out asking you to pay just to maintain a consistent identity across platforms. It's time to make sure you've got trademarks on your namespaces IMO (if possible). At least that gives the upside of being able to make legal demands to companies that don't do enough to prevent impersonation and namespace squatting.
Quekid5 4y ago
At least we know that we're on borrowed time and maybe the wider ecosystem can come up with a decent (distributed, even?) alternative instead of everybody panicking and just moving toward another rug-pull.
- rc_mob 4y ago
  Yup. Its still happening even if delayed a year or two and obfuscated by some complications.
twblalock 4y ago
It's incredibly tiresome that the first post on HN whenever a company does a press release is going to be from someone who will never be happy no matter what was said. "What does take responsibility mean?" "This is just PR fluff". "They are just saving face." Criticism of good things because the poster didn't like the motivation. Stuff like that. Did you really think the company was going to bare their soul to you like you were their psychiatrist or their priest? Do you think you are even entitled to that? Commenting about whether or not this is a good decision is valuable. Complaining about the content of PR fluff is not.
- ljm 4y ago
  Cynicism is cheap
- genmud 4y ago
  These decisions should never have seen the light of day, let alone a policy that was communicated in the way they did. Why should we cheer on PR and product folks trying to break their fucking arms patting themselves on the back for walking back an incredibly disruptive, short sighted and user-hostile decision?
  - PUSH_AX 4y ago
    Because A) of all the permutations of follow up decisions that could have been made, this falls on the "good choice" side, and B) this isn't "pat on the back" situation, this is a save face situation.
- fwlr 4y ago
  It’s no more or less tiresome than a press release is itself. Whatever the material contents, a press release has “positivity” set to 1.0 (or as close to 1.0 as permitted by law and professional standards). This upsets the balance of the world, and that balance can be restored by submitting a reply with “positivity” set to 0.0 (or as close to 0.0 as permitted by law and standards of etiquette). Analogous to “someone who will never be happy no matter what was said”, the tone of the press release will always be happy no matter what they have to say. It seems very natural - almost inevitable, even - that someone will reply to an artificially max-positive document with an artificially max-negative comment. (Personally, I made peace with the tiresome nature of both press releases and critical replies by viewing it as an informal application of Laplace’s Rule - add one success and one failure to the total count to more accurately estimate the real underlying probability. The press release presents one observation guaranteed to be as positive as possible, and the inevitable critical reply presents another observation guaranteed to be as negative as possible, so with those two in hand you can look at other observations and get a better final estimation.)
dymk 4y ago
Negative generic FUD
wefarrell 4y ago
Yup, this should be addressed with the same level of detail and transparency as a postmortem for a technical failure. What were the multiple points of failure that led to this decision and how are they altering their operations from preventing something like this from happening again? Without deep transparency they will lose trust.
nerdjon 4y ago
100% this. If this wasn’t Docker’s first time making a bad decision maybe I would think that this decision is on hold indefinitely. But it isn’t and they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. I will be continuing with my original plan of communicating ideally not using DockerHub internally and making every effort remove our reliance off of it.
burnished 4y ago
>After listening to feedback and consulting our community, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision in sunsetting our Free Team plan. Last week we felt our communications were terrible but our policy was sound. It’s now clear that both the communications and the policy were wrong, so we’re reversing course and no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan Seriously, what else do you want? This kind of pointless whinging is just noise. They flat out said they were wrong in the first place.
- genmud 4y ago
  I have already stated what I want, but I’ll spell it out 1) transparency into who was responsible for this decision 2) how exactly this decision was made and how they came to the conclusion that it was sound policy 3) how they are going to prevent these decisions that are disruptive, user-hostile and short sighted in the future 4) some degree of commitment they won’t sunset this in the future when people aren’t as upset

fariszr 4y ago

Too late for me personally. Already deleted accounts of my projects and switched to GHCR/Quay.io with a custom domain redirect [1] to avoid this happening again. GitHub is really living up to its reputation of being the open source hub. 1. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/docker-image-registry-facade/ https://httptoolkit.com/blog/docker-image-registry-facade/

nextlevelwizard 4y ago
Just remember who owns Github. EEE.
- fariszr 4y ago
  That's why I did setup the custom link redirect, i can easily migrate at any time!
- TavsiE9s 4y ago
  They might start charging for it but heck Microsoft still supports running VB6 applications on modern Windows. Not a fanboy by any measure but killing projects and products left, right, and centre isn't something they usually do.
  - benatkin 4y ago
    Yes, but what about VB6 itself? "Where can I install/buy Visual Basic 6?" https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/49c35ab3-ead2-43d1-9fa8-69aa277a8d9c/where-can-i-installbuy-visual-basic-6?forum=vssetup https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/49c35ab...
    - _gabe_ 4y ago
      There's nothing wrong with no longer wanting to distribute a 25 year old application that you no longer support development tools for. However your comment is completely disingenuous. One of the first links I ran into was a massive support article from Microsoft about how they will still allow VB6 applications to run on Windows and gave detailed instructions/tools on upgrading a Visual Basic project so you can continue development and don't lose all the work. > While the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported, Microsoft's goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications continue to run on supported Windows versions. The resources available from this page should help you as you maintain existing applications, and as you migrate your functionality to .NET.[0] This is much better support than other companies provide for discontinued platforms. Do you personally want to be on the hook for a version of your software you wrote/released 25 years ago? Especially if you've released what you consider to be improved upgrades of the software? Would you even be willing to help users upgrade from your 25 year old software? If the answer to any of those is no, then you're providing a very skewed perspective on what reasonable support for a product looks like. And once again, Microsoft is still writing articles 20 years after the initial release to help users upgrade. For all the bad crap Microsoft does, completely abandoning widely used frameworks is not one of them. [0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/visual-basic-6/visual-basic-6.0-documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

onedr0p 4y ago

I still refuse to use Dockerhub and I cannot wait for Podman (and building multiarch containers) on Mac to get better so I can absolutely ditch anything Docker Inc or anything Mirantis touches all together. These are two companies I will NEVER trust again and will use whatever power I have to convince others to do the same.

alphabettsy 4y ago
Are Red Hat / IBM better?
- nordsieck 4y ago
  Probably not better in so far as they're also trying to make a buck. But IBM has pretty deep pockets - the kind where they could feasibly write off the bandwidth of a container image registry as a goodwill gesture and not bat an eye. Same with GitHub/Microsoft. From recently history, the same cannot be said about Docker the company.
- rc_mob 4y ago
  Pure gut feeling from having to work with employees from both companies, but yes. I feel like RedHat people care more about open source toooling.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Experienced sell-support-for-open-source business conservatively funneling enterprises into its support network vs increasingly desperate VC money young-ish startup doing things without being able to predict consequences.
victorgama 4y ago
Same! Can't wait to just get rid of it completely. Red Hat also hosted Container Plumbing Days this week and was pretty good! Looking forward to what they will do with Podman (specially on macOS)

atlgator 4y ago

Too late. We already ditched Docker for Podman. It was a lot easier than I expected.

berkle4455 4y ago
But most projects are still published to dockerhub aren't they? Or was this only for hosting of your own private images?
- verdverm 4y ago
  This was about public images for free docker organizations (teams), used by many open source projects for branding / naming consistency. I maintain one of the projects which moved to ghcr.io and have no interest in moving back, only further away. They have shown their hand and can no longer be trusted as good stewards or ecosystem participants imo
alphabettsy 4y ago
How does switching to Podman mitigate the problem of container image hosting that people were upset about?
- rc_mob 4y ago
  lol true. but redhat does offe quay.io which is fine
  - wankle 4y ago
    It's starting to feel like Red Hat people are the ones amp'ing all this up.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  [dead]
nextlevelwizard 4y ago
You do realize that you moving away is actually a win for Dockerhub, right? Whole point of removing the free plan wasn't to squeeze money out from you, but to make you pay for the free storage and bandwidth. If you don't take up that free storage and bandwidth that is literally the same as removing your free plan. I don't know how podman does container storing, but if everyone moves over you probably shouldn't expect them to have free tier forever. EDIT: I would love to hear your counter arguments since you are downvoting. Why am I wrong?

gosukiwi 4y ago

... for now.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yieldcrv 4y ago

“enough people switched away such that it’s no longer a burden, but we also lost a bunch of other users too”

codeptualize 4y ago

With these things I always wonder how many people they ignored to push this through. I am pretty sure there are plenty of people at Docker who 100% accurately predicted this, spoke up about it, and got ignored.

hughw 4y ago

Well, thank you, Docker.

nrclark 4y ago

Docker, Inc. is in a tricky position. They've raised a lot of capital, and continue to raise capital. According to Wikipedia, they took $105 million from Bain Capital in November of last year. So Docker, Inc has Mirantis on one side, and a whole bunch of VC on the other side. I'm sure that Docker Hub is expensive to run, and the core Docker app isn't free to maintain either. This TOS change was a fiasco, and absolutely didn't succeed in doing anything other than losing a lot of community goodwill. But I do understand why they're trying to squeeze some money out of Docker Hub. I'd be surprised if it's even break-even for them right now, and VC funds aren't exactly known for their acts of charity.

GordonS 4y ago
I get what you are saying, but I gave little sympathy for their situation - they used the VC tactic of "give it away to gain and monopolise the market, then do the old switcheroo once we're #1", so they had to know what was coming.
- jolux 4y ago
  Not really what happened — they planned to build a cloud platform on top of it and probably subsidize Docker Hub using those profits. But they got their lunch ate by Kubernetes.
  - coding123 4y ago
    Which is crappy, because while I use k8s, it's actually poorly written, half baked and kinda non-portable. The fact that it depends on ELB when you use it at Amazon (just to extract more money), is super sad. Docker Swarm was a pure technology that didn't have such shitty half thought-out dependencies.
    - belthesar 4y ago
      Personal thoughts and feelings about k8s aside, please don't conflate the requirements of EKS, Amazon's managed k8s offering of which they are fit to do what they do best and tightly knit their own products to come up with a solution, with k8s as a whole. You're perfectly welcome to deploy your own k8s with static IPs for ingress to nginx if you'd like on AWS, as you can anywhere.

codeptualize 4y ago

You can not be the main player and betray the trust of your users (free or not). It's easy to forget the value of being an important part of a community that makes decisions on millions of $$$ in software spending, but be sure that there are plenty of companies who would love to take your place. Reverting this incredibly dumb decision is the right course of action but there is a long way ahead to restore trust.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Betray trust? They had a generous free tier for a long time. It cannot last forever. Perhaps it was predatory pricing. Even so, my takeaway is folks shouldn't bet on any one service being free forever.
- palata 4y ago
  Maybe not bet on the service being free forever, but 30 days is not a lot of time to migrate away if you can't afford the new pricing...
- codeptualize 4y ago
  I'm not saying they have the obligation to keep the free tier, but don't expect people to stick around. Also free plans can definitely last, best example being Github. If Github would cut off free open source repos it would be over, and I'm pretty sure they are very aware of that. My point is, it's a mistake to assume people will pay for something that was free and it's a misunderstanding to think there is no symbiotic relationship. Hosting a giant community can be incredibly valuable, especially when it's tech people with big budgets in your sector. It's imo a business mistake to monetize in a way that goes against that. The community will have no issue finding a new home that does appreciate them (e.g. Github).
- theamk 4y ago
  Here is how you stop free service without betraying trust: First, lock creation of new free accounts. Then announce that: - After a long time (at least a year), newer images won't be accepted on free plan and after even longer time, existing images would be deleted. - After a long time (at least a year), free plan images would be deleted, starting with least used first. - Downloads from free accounts are heavily throttled. Speed becomes even slower the more stuff that IP downloads. The full speed is restored if either account owner or downloader have paid accounts - In a few months, accounts get a quota, and you only get 10 downloads/hour for free. Everyone else gets an error message and have to try again in an hour. ... see? So many way to wind it down without having everyone freak out. Docker has really flubbed that decision.

tommica 4y ago

I hope the team can figure out how to monetize their stuff and keep rolling forward - their tech is amazing!

iamleppert 4y ago

They didn't know their place, and still don't -- clearly. Dockerhub has very little to offer (basically hanging on by a thread) and doesn't deliver enough value to justify an expense for what was always claimed to be a free service. If you give something away for free, it better be just a starting point, for you to figure out how you're going to add enough value to justify people paying you. And then -- make your case and tell them why. Docker didn't do any of this. They literally tried to take a free product and just start charging for it. It feels the same as a restaurant who gave free toothpicks away suddenly want to start charging for them. This speaks to how out of touch their senior leadership is, and the only possible thing they can do to recover is to part ways with the leaders who made that terrible business decision. I've been in meetings like this before -- some analyst runs a SQL query and makes the case for charging for something that has always been free, and hamstrung leadership goes along with it because it sounds like such an easy way to "unlock value". What they really mean, is, easy way to make money off unsuspecting people via something that should probably be illegal, and would be in a different context (i.e. bait and switch).

AviationAtom 4y ago
Yep, the path to monetization is always adding new value-adds, not trying to charge for the current functionality after the fact.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  This assumes one knows how scalable such a generous free offering will be forever, on day one. Much more likely they were basically dumping to undercut the competition and gain market share. Though I suppose some startups are genuinely naive enough to just launch and hope they'll find a revenue stream rich enough later.
- brookst 4y ago
  So if someone underpriced today, they are obligated to give it to you for less forever?
  - 4y ago

markus_zhang 4y ago

I'm curious, are they profitable? Docker is a super popular tool and I thought whoever has been there from the beginning should have 7 digits in their accounts.

mkl95 4y ago
Their ARR is over 50M, and they have raised $400M+ over the years. I wonder how much of that they have burnt.

john-tells-all 4y ago

My applause to Alex Ellis for writing a clear, direct call to arms! Their work is super useful and interesting. I've added them to my list of sponsorships: https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis

tremon 4y ago
You might want to add that that's the author of the previous post calling attention to this policy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35166317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35166317), because without knowing that information your post reads like a spam comment that has nothing to do with this story.
- alexellisuk 4y ago
  Hey - it's Alex here. Someone sent me a link to the parent comment. Thank you John - for the support. Tremon - I get it - Hacker News users are super sceptical and fastidious. Here's a link to the "call to arms" as John calls it: https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-images/ https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-ima... Alex

mkl95 4y ago

Sounds desperate. Maybe a large chunk of users left in the last few days.

mnau 4y ago

I get that images costs money to host, but they could instead add a new feature that would spread out the costs (~bittorrent), while the hub would be the seed of last resort. VC capital wants its money back I guess.

thatwasunusual 4y ago

Who still use Docker, and not just the tool?

rc_mob 4y ago
Hello guy who does not have the same needs as me. I do. I use docker a lot. It saves me tons of headache.

wildmXranat 4y ago

Well. So what's the plan then? If they were doing this to create more revenue and limit spend, then will they be trouble down the line?

chrismarlow9 4y ago

At this point they just should have kept going. Doing what they did is a all in move, backtracking just makes it worse.

ericb 4y ago

I'm impressed. I do think this is a smart business move. You don't want to trade being "the place" for Docker for being "one, slightly more profitable place among many." MBA CEO: We beat earnings estimates this quarter by more than 100 golden eggs, via our sale of the goose that lays golden eggs.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

Can someone explain this to me since I don't really use docker so all this feels weird to me? It would appear the entity provides oft-used service. Did they overstep on price or the suddenness of the announcement or some other combination I am not seeing? Did they promise it will be free forever?

palata 4y ago
My issue with it, for open source projects, was that it was not really clear what exactly would happen, and then my understanding of what would happen did not please me at all. My understanding was that I had 30 days to migrate my projects away (or pay, but for many open source projects there is no money). If I did nothing, I would lose access to my images on their registry, but the image would stay (and rot) there, which is even worse than the image being removed.
cpuguy83 4y ago
> Did they promise it will be free forever? No, unless having a free tier means forever. Docker announced they would end the free "teams" tier and that people would need to migrate to a paid plan to retain their teams. The communication was rocky and non-specific as to the details of the impact and only gave a 30-day notice. They quickly (next day or two?) followed up to give more specifics as to what that means (and doesn't mean). Now a couple of days after that they are pulling back on it completely due to backlash. Probably they could have gotten away with extending the time-frame... I'm not sure why anyone would think 30 days would be ok, but I suppose it is the free tier.
gpm 4y ago
From my perspective a large part of the issue is that they were trying to charge the wrong people. What they needed to do was figure out some way to make the people using dockerhub to build things to pay. What they attempted to do was charge people making it possible for other people to build things off of dockerhub. This meant that a lot of projects providing free services to docker were going to walk. For example why would the curl project upload curl images if it was going to cost them money? The people benefiting from those uploads were the people downloading the images, dockers customers (some already paying), not the curl project. (Curl is famous enough that docker wasn't going to charge them, but there are lots of less famous similar projects that they were trying to charge). Moreover these were frequently open source projects, which are very cost adverse by nature, and who you want to be seen as supporting not exploiting. What docker really needs to figure out is a way to charge companies downloading images, not people uploading them. Given how their service works, I have no clue how they manage that.

wg0 4y ago

There's no way out of it. Investors want their investment back and docker at this point is just a registry that otherwise anyone can deploy backed with some object storage or use any of other dozens out there. No other big player willing or interested to buy it either.

victorgama 4y ago

To be honest I'm not sure which move was worse: They announcing they would be sunsetting, or they going back on the decision after the backlash. I feel like the trust was already lost after the initial decision; there's no going back after that.

majewsky 4y ago
You forgot the part in the middle where they tried to gaslight everyone about what kind of sunset was announced.

rcarmo 4y ago

Well, too late. I whipped up a simple GitHub workflow in around 15m and am using it (with slight variations) on all my images to push them to ghcr.io: https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-handbrake/blob/master/.github/workflows/deploy.yml https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-handbrake/blob/master/.gith... Multi-platform builds are trickier, but essentially the same.

alexellisuk 4y ago
Multi-arch builds are easy to "transfer" IMHO crane cp docker.io/openfaas/gateway:0.10.0 ghcr.io/openfaas/gateway:0.10.0 If you've not used it yet - do take a look. Crane doesn't pull the images into a local Docker library for re-tagging and re-pushing. https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/blob/main/cmd/crane/doc/crane.md https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/blob/main/cmd...
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Nice. The issue I have with some of my multi-arch stuff is that I began doing it before buildx stabilised, and I also launched multiple runners in parallel because some of the builds take... a long time.

cmer 4y ago

Docker is awesome tech but a terrible company with a terrible business model. I don’t see them surviving long term. Especially with the way they operate and alienate people.

djbusby 4y ago

When this all went down I was looking to move to some type of proxy for their hub, like I do for other tools (aka: mirror). My mirrors for CPAN, NPM, Packagist, Go and Debian were all (mostly) trivial to configure and use. Docker not so much. Still working to figure out how to route both search and pull to use our mirror. That it's hard to mirror feels like it's even more important to mirror. A rug pull never happens at a good time and makes it's occurrence more expensive than a planned event.

nine_k 4y ago

I hope they called it Project Joshua internally.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Makes me laugh! So many issues (not just this) because no one wants to pay for an FTP server and write some FTP commands, secure of course. And the VC companies make something say a tiny but more convenient but then pull the rug.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

Haha! Victory! Suddenly they realize that people will go their own way rather then be strong armed, all their work writing themselves in as the center of the docker universe was about to go poof. I’m pretty sure it’s their destiny to be usurped but they’ve bought some time to become useful or find a way to lock people in to their platform. Now is the time for everyone to find an alternate means to share their docker images.

emocin 4y ago

“Oops! All angry users”

RyeCombinator 4y ago

[flagged]

zx8080 4y ago

What if it changes tomorrow? I'm moving even personal projects to a private repo and gonna build the base image or two myself, just in case someone's investor wants to step on the gas and milk me some moneys. Having some personal infra is not a big deal. It's actually getting easier, if not legshooting with overcomplexity.

ltbarcly3 4y ago

If you weren't planning on switching because of the for-cost team plan, you really should switch now. If Docker can't charge for their software at all without having so many people migrate away that they have to reverse the decision, then they are not a viable commercial entity and will randomly disappear in 1 or 3 or 5 years, probably when it is very inconvenient and you haven't prepared for it.

jaimex2 4y ago

Is there a CO2 leak in that office or something?

dajonker 4y ago

If they want to make money, they should stop listening to the community and start asking themselves "What would Oracle do?" I think a lot of companies would not really be capable to setup an alternative in time and would just have to start paying instead. Which would not be a bad thing. The opportunity cost of switching might be higher than just paying Docker for their services.

anaganisk 4y ago
Oracle would've charged per core and per GB of ram and number of containers to license your docker install. Free would allow 3 containers, on single core and 512MB ram. Sales people would be calling everyday to upgrade to docker pro, which is $120 per month/per user that will allow you to self host your registry, on premises or Managed Oracle cloud (vms and bandwidth extra). Ran docker run without a valid license? Prepare to be sued.

jakobnissen 4y ago

Ooiooiooooioooioiiioooook oooooioooo og en del oooi i oooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooo

deafpolygon 4y ago

Docker needs to pivot and change their business model to non-profit foundation. You can't charge for something that's already free, it makes no sense.

voytec 4y ago

They won't regain people's trust and confidence in them (as a company) fast.

ouraf 4y ago

maybe they can use the expenses maintaining docker images of projects that are beneficial to a broader FOSS user community to pay less taxes or something, or brag about their phylantropy on accounting reports. I don't believe the revenue from these avenues would save or kill the company anyway, so better make a lemonade of these lemons, right?