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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

so, when's everyone switching over to Podman?

If you're doing $10M in ARR, how much engineering time are you going to spend to switch compared to paying Docker a few thousand dollars a month? Your spend on cloud and Slack (or other comms) is likely far higher. You're probably spending more on mobile/cell business service.

"Docker attempting to monetize users of its product who can easily afford the cost." I mean, the terms seems reasonable, and wouldn't you rather support Docker vs IBM (Redhat->Podman)?

Nothing changes for users who aren't making money using Docker, but I suppose you could still spend your time switching to podman on principal.

I'm part of a large company and I have no influence over what most other people do. My projects within the company are small so whenever these sorts of things happen, it rarely translates into the company spending a bunch of money to provide the product across the company. At best, I may be able to convince a manager to buy it for 2-10 people on my team.

Licensing isn't perfect. On the contrary, it is the least worst implementation of attempting to extract a reasonable amount of revenue from the user of your software, who is realizing value creation or benefit themselves from its use. SaaS is popular because the exchange of value between producer and consumer (and the ownership and responsibility model) is much more clear (imho). Open source tooling might be a better fit based on your org's needs and your use case.

Solving for the intersection of building and maintaining tools people desire and those building said tools eating and paying rent is hard.

(no affiliation with docker)

I'll preface this by saying I'm an IBM employee. That being said your comment rubbed me the wrong way...

> wouldn't you rather support Docker vs IBM (Redhat->Podman)?

Podman is an open source product and Docker is not. I'd much rather support an open source project. And what's wrong with "supporting" IBM anyways? Did they hurt you in some way???

Docker is not really a product, Docker is a company with in that there are several products, some are open source some are not.

The Docker Engine is Apache License and open source.

> And what's wrong with "supporting" IBM anyways? Did they hurt you in some way???

They are a dysfunctional consultancy masquerading as a technology firm, running on inertia. They are not to be supported. (Also, my genuine condolences)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24228972

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532125

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869877

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22224782

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706128

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24471903

FWIW, we've divested/spun off the "consultancy" part. And not every part of IBM is bad, there are a ton of great developers and teams that work here, no condolences needed. I quite enjoy doing what I do here. Lots of innovation in multiple areas, but I guess if you have to drink the startup koolaid prevalent here on HN, be my guest.

I'm not at a startup nor drink the koolaid [1]. I am a consultant, so I get to see how the sausage is made across a wide variety of orgs. In my long tenure in tech (20+ years), I have arrived at evangelizing and encouraging engineering first and data driven organizations; in my experience, that provides the best environment for technologists to have autonomy, while pursuing mastery and purpose (which, hopefully, enables some amount of fulfillment alongside financial compensation). IBM is not such an org, hence my comment(s), but there are startups, enterprises, and a fat middle of SMB businesses that truly are innovative and can demonstrate results to back up that description of themselves.

TLDR I want the best experience for my fellow technologists and engineers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28181703

Many people in many ways

Docker Desktop is not open source, but the Docker container engine is. Also, runc, which is the actual container runtime, is not only open source, but was created by docker but is also what gets used by podman. podman is very nearly just a fork with the daemon and socket removed, which would not have been possible if docker hadn't been open source.

My tiny part of a division of my last company made $40 million USD per year in revenue. We had ~40 employees. Getting the funding for using something like this came from a few levels up and would be in no way guaranteed.

I admit Docker will likely have to tweak their licensing model while also building relationships where there is some wiggle room for how licensing is handled (perhaps accept credit card payments from corporate users that they can expense to sidestep procurement). "Call Us For Pricing"

We do accept credit card payments. All our pricing is on the website https://docker.com/pricing - the Business plan will be available by credit card soon as well.

At my institution the "adapt open source" vs "buy" balance is also affected by the high effort of making a purchase happen. My bet is that things will get hung up on an exclusive acquisition justification, at which point the IBM/RHEL sales team will come in with "solution" using podman, buildah, etc. I've quit DD just now to try those tools out.

This seems like a false economy. Docker adds insane value for us (similar number of tech employees), and while I don't like price hikes based on things other than value add features, I certainly want Docker to exist in five years. Or get bought by Hashicorp, perhaps.

as soon as a viable alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac exists I am done with this company forever (and they seem to be anticipating that)

Honest question: what features of DfM are you using and what alternatives have you tried that don't work for you?

Just use multipass https://multipass.run and folder mount.

This. This is what I do (except I use VS Code to remote to the Multipass VM)

why do you need the Docker Desktop? Can't you just use the command line? I mostly use Docker on Linux and even then I've almost switched everything over to Podman.

The Docker CLI can't do anything without the Docker daemon. Daemon (and containers) only runs on Linux. On Mac, it needs to run inside a Linux VM.

Before Docker Desktop, would need to create VM with Docker and connect to that. Docker Desktop makes that smooth and wraps in nice UI.

I've used Docker for years and never touched Desktop. What's indispensable about it?

It's not great, at all. But at least on Mac it's a lot easier to get going with Docker for Mac than it is to roll your own with e.g. VirtualBox. I assume it's the same on Windows.

I just use whatever `brew install docker` gives me. They don't call that Docker Desktop, right? I thought that was some kind of GUI thing of theirs—I do all my dockering from the command line, which looks the same across Mac and Linux except when (rarely, these days) the virtualization the Mac implementation uses leaks through.

The key is the virtualization. I think (!) with `brew install docker` you've got to set up a VM and get Docker running inside it, yourself. Docker Desktop for Mac does that, and implements filesystem and networking integration for you.

Most people like the convenience of that, if not the performance or (now) the cost.

Closest I've come to having to manually set up anything with a simple `brew install docker` making sure my shell sets the env vars correctly. It automatically sets up the VM, and has since I started using it years ago.

(but, it's possible that what I'm using is also considered Docker Desktop—I just associated that term with their GUI thingy [and I think it includes some kind of sys tray widget?], which I've never used)

[EDIT] oh no you're kinda right, I think I recall having to run one command, post-install, on older versions, to set up the VM, though I don't think you still have to and that was all still handled for you, you just had to tell it to do it. `docker-machine create default` or something like that, was enough for 99% of use cases. Don't have to even do that, now, though, IIRC.

Podman doesn't do what docker desktop does. They are not the same thing at all.

When it's actually 100%ly compliant in it's APIs, especially regarding podman-compose and the socket API.

If you want an open source alternative, just use Docker Engine, it's still open source.

You can install the docker client inside WSL/OSX and connect over SSH to a docker CE instance.

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