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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

Podman, the open source alternative to the open source parts of Docker. To be clear.

This looks more like the Podman version of Docker Desktop (which is closed source, and no longer free), effectively, as it's handling the virtualization aspects for you according to[0].

[0] https://twitter.com/simnalamburt/status/1434244533001224192

The Docker CLI is also available for Mac, and is open-source.

Does that handle virtualization for you like this does? Is it distributed pre-built anywhere?

I honestly looked just now and couldn't find anything.

I would be surprised if it didn't, as Docker wouldn't work at all then.

It doesn't.

That is part of the "Docker Desktop" offer, which is non-free.

I just heard (from another commenter), that's dire. I'm stunned.

Why? Anyone can assemble an equivalent from available open-source tools:

* Virtualbox * Your favorite Linux distro * Docker engine on the Linux VM * Docker CLI on the Mac host * A variety of filesystem sync solutions (I don’t remember their names but there are several)

Alternatively there’s also docker-machine.

The closed source app gets you the convenience of not having to set that all up. If you don’t like installing closed source apps you probably prefer to set things up yourself anyway. So what’s the problem?

On the contrary, I like using OSS stuff that someone else has to maintain.

But the Docker engine (that runs containers on the local machine) is only available on Mac and Windows via Docker Desktop which is not free-as-in-beer anymore for all.

This is incorrect. The Docker engine shipped in Docker for Mac is built from the exact same Docker Engine in the open-source release. It’s the native Mac application wrapping the engine in a single-purpose hypervisor that is closed source.

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