Docker’s Bad Week

I don't have a stake in it (don't barely use Docker), and don't know all the details of what happened or who it affects how (I was, fruitlessly, hoping to get them when I clicked on this piece), and this still reads like a piece by someone who is friends with executives at Docker and set out to defend them.

His basic point seems to be that this decision wasn't about Docker's revenue, because it's effect would only be a "rounding error on [their] income statement."

If the cancellation of free teams plan isn't expected to have any non-trivial effect on their income statement... doesn't it just make them look even less competent for taking on so much bad PR for... what? Why _did_ they do it? OP says everyone knows taking away free things makes people really mad, that's no surprise. So if not for affects on income statement, then... what?

The OP argument is... because they thought the plan wasn't serving users well? I mean, I guess.... but the users would seem to disagree? And the OP doesn't really specify what about it wasn't "serving users well", just that Docker execs said so.

At any rate, the way a company behaves if it wants to look like it's in a stable position, and making sober careful decisions about long-term directions -- especially if they want customers to believe they are not about income but about serving users well -- would be having a much longer deprecation period than 30 days. Perhaps ending creation of new accounts in the deprecated category, but allowing existing accounts for a year maybe.

> Should these “open collaborators” have caught the Free Team snafu before it happened? Perhaps. But the point with Docker, as with any company, is not what it does at a given moment in time, but rather its general direction over time.

There were HN threads looking at the overall direction Docker seems to be taking[1]. I'm personally not outraged, but the way it was communicated eroded a bit of trust. The FAQ that came after emphasized that no existing images will be deleted unless the maintainers delete them. Damage in trust is already done though.

This article reads a bit weird to me though. Instead of also reporting on what open source maintainers thought about this (some are supportive), it reads more like PR damage control. With the way Docker rolled out these changes, this isn't a good look for Docker either.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35168802

This is such a weird article.

If docker doesn't really care then why did they do it?

It was serving users very well because they wouldn't have used Docker hub if it didn't.

Also the open source program isn't a real replacement, its very restrictive and annoying to apply to.

Anyway quay.io and Github exist.

> Out went Docker Enterprise and Swarm.

Swarm still exists and is still used.

> Instead, Johnston suggests, the idea is to make it simple for open source projects to move to the sponsored open source program: “You don’t have to do anything with your account. All you have to do is apply. And if you apply, then we’re just going to bless you, wave you in, you’re good.”

I'm curious, has that been anyone's experience? From the discourse it seems like there is a disconnect between how the sponsored open source program actually works and how the CEO thinks it works.

>sponsored open source tier

https://www.docker.com/community/open-source/application/

Let's read the fine print:

>Your organization must not seek to make a profit through services or by charging for higher tiers. [italics mine]

Certainly we can wag our fingers at the Chromiums and Darwins of the world, but making a profit through services (paid support) is the original open-source funding model as supported by the FSF et al and practiced by Red Hat and the others. A great deal of the software widely celebrated as Free, including support for a lot of Linux kernel development, has come through the Free-software/paid-support model.

It's dubious to claim you support "open-source" projects with a clause like that in your terms.

Dunno how the author came to his conclusion. It is kinda backwards.

It is Dockers paying costumers that benefit the most from one way stop images of FOSS projects since they are locked in to a greater degree.

> I’ve learned that often people get the most upset about things they haven’t paid for. Free as in beer, free as in outrage.

This is not irrational. I know if I use something for free, I am paying for it in some other way, e.g. I will have ads targetting me, I will be locked in for the future etc.

I don't even need to understand what it is, as I know full well there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Therefore I feel I did pay/ am paying something, and I will be infuriated if the service I rely on is yanked.

Docker's website has this +WASM thing on their logo which is odd.

https://www.docker.com/

WASM, like Docker, has great potential for isolation, and with it privacy, security, and reliability.

However, what kind of stuff do we want to protect our projects from? One thing I would like to avoid is having to cater to every whim of Docker, Inc.

It does seem like a poorly worded announcement. If they are sunsetting that free tier, but everyone with an active open source project really can be rubber-stamped into a sponsored tier that is better, they should have led with that in the first place. It's the job of these announcements to be crystal clear, and anticipate misunderstandings and head them off before they blow up. Even their second "sorry, we fucked up!" announcement didn't do a great job of addressing the elephant in the room, and at that point there's no excuse. People do not do close readings of press releases, you have to put a big box around the part you want us to take away.

For docker as a company looking for a revenue stream, I find it odd they decided to go after the registry. Seems short sighted. Have the leaders lost their minds?

After they apparently lost the container runtime race to kubernetes, swarm took a back seat. Which is really a shame.

I personally still think there is room for a good container runtime system like k8s but simpler.

I think they did it to quickly filter their customer base. Get rid of the ones that will objectively never pay.

The ones who will stay, are the ones who will be willing to pay.

Now there is a slight risk, that no one stays, but hey, ceos need to ceo.