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Docker Hub has little to offer, and yet everyone was up in arms when what little they offered for free gets taken away. Don't you see the contradiction here?

“The food at this restaurant is terrible!”

“Yeah, and such small portions too!”

Nobody goes to that place anymore, it’s always far too busy!

If that was really what was happening, then nobody would be upset if they started charging more. People would just stop going there.

It’s a famous old joke, about how people just want to complain. The joke is that these are probably repeat visitors who make the same complaints every time. It’s bad, and we want more.

Gotcha. Not anglophone here, I don't know all the inside jokes yet!

No, because there is no such thing as "everyone complaining". Those are different user groups.

Docker Hub has little to offer to most commercial businesses. When we looked at it, it was hilariously slow and had basically no advantage over any other commercial registry. There was no reason to give our company dollars to Docker instead of Amazon or Google.

Docker Hub is pretty important to open-source projects, as there are very few providers who are ready to distribute large binary files for free without ads or even possibility of them. It was also pretty important to tech companies who use said projects but lack the resources to set up private registry and build docker images they need.

It's the former users who bring money to Docker, and it were latter users who were complaining. There is definitely some overlap but unfortunately (for Docker the company) it is not that big.

Yes and the fact that they don't see the difference between the user groups is symptomatic of the problems that have blighted their attempts to find a workable business model. They offer little to no value to the people who can (and will) pay for things and a lot of value to people who can only structurally "afford" a free service.

In that world charging is never going to yield success. The free-only users are going to find some alternative and in forcing them to do so you have sacrificed the goodwill from the free service in the first place, and the people who could pay won't do so in this case because you literally aren't offering them anything worth paying for.

> Docker Hub has little to offer to most commercial businesses.

> It was also pretty important to tech companies who use said projects

Should I add anything? If you can't make your point without such glaring contradictions, I don't know if the point is worth making.

The contradictions go away a bit when you relent from strawmanning, that second quote is half of a statement which doesn't say what you've clipped it to say.

The guidelines of the site specifically say to respond to the strongest argument, I'd recommend doing that instead of what you're doing.

How can I be making a strawman? I'm directly quoting what you wrote. Here, I can quote the whole sentence (I omitted the second half for brevity):

> Docker Hub has little to offer to most commercial businesses.

> It was also pretty important to tech companies who use said projects but lack the resources to set up private registry and build docker images they need.

So, docker has, at the same time, "little to offer to commercial businesses", but it it's "pretty important for tech companies who use [OSS] projects" but lack resources to not rely on docker hub. I still see the contradiction.

Spare me the reference to the site guidelines. You piggybacked off my comment and made an unrelated point (docker hub is too slow for your business - how is that relevant to my initial comment?). Kettle, pot, all that.

> So, docker has, at the same time, "little to offer to commercial businesses"

That's not what was said, you missed out the word "most", which changes the meaning of the quote:

> Docker Hub has little to offer to most commercial businesses

It can simultaneously be true that:

* Docker Hub has little to offer most businesses

* Docker Hub is valuable to businesses that don't have the resources to set up a private registry.

These can both be true if only a minority of businesses fall into the second category.

I don't think that's exactly true (we'd need to weight businesses by revenue or number of employees for it to maybe be true), but their comment isn't self contradictory.

> I'm directly quoting what you wrote.

> You piggybacked off my comment and made an unrelated point (docker hub is too slow for your business - how is that relevant to my initial comment?). Kettle, pot, all that.

I'm not the person you were originally replying to.

It has little to offer for paid users. It’s a great place to host your open-source images (you know; the community work that caused Docker to be so popular in the first place).

Forced to pay or leave, the OSS folks will all leave.

The only value Docker Hub offers is that Docker refuses to make Docker consume non-Docker Hub image sources conveniently.

Remove Docker vendor lock-in and what you are left with is: Docker Hub offers the value of being able to serve static files over HTTPS.

> 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).

When a service is free I don't think you can say it's a bait and switch when the one offering can no longer afford giving so much away.

Even for paid services, there is no guarantee prices won't rise once a contract expires, or at the next billing cycle. Now if they had promised free forever then perhaps a case could be made for false advertising.

This is an interesting point. If the alternative to charging for a free service is to cancel it, which should one do? This of course is usually a false dichotomy. An alternative is to set it free for an exchange of goodwill and perceived loss of potential monetary value. But hey, that's what a true friendship and family entails. Professional dishonesty is pernicious. Hand back your PR degrees, people, if you want to make the world a better place.

Should free services be heavily scrutinized as an anti-competitive dirty marketing tactic, then?

If you have deeper pockets than your competitor you could bleed them dry by offering it for free until they're dead and then "coincidentally" not being able to afford keeping it free after that.

I distrust free services as a consumer at this point, but I think it's unrealistic to expect enough people to do that to keep it from being a way of distorting the market and stifling competition.

If it's less of a dirty trick and more of a "shit, we thought we'd figure something out, but we didn't" then I still think there being more scrutiny/regulation around free services could be beneficial purely to push companies away from stupid self-defeating and market-harming business models?

$0.00 is a price like any other. A free service is a special case of the loss leader. How far do you extend this extra scrutiny?

Maybe Linux should be illegal?

It’s such an odd position. Like, the age old razors / razor blades model should be illegal? Video game consoles / video games?

Subsidizing an initial purchase by charging for ongoing services is so core to our economy that I’m not sure what it would look like to prohibit it.

Linux isn't a service

Sure it is, just like docker, the code might be free , but there’s plenty of enterprise support contracts.

I imagine a lawyer could convince a jury of people who have never heard of hacker news, gnu, etc that this is true.

Free enterprise support contracts?

No, the thread stems from above where it's basically indicated that free things should be illegal if there's things being sold off the back of it.

The precedent things like this would create could easily be extended to other things. Good lawyers could hold things the OP isn't think about to this standard. Especially if theres a jury uninformed about the topic at hand.

So not a service, rather software surrounded by unaffiliated services? This post is about the official service part of Docker. To my knowledge there is no official Linux service.

Do you get new versions on physical media?

No, I get them from unaffiliated hosting, like package managers or SCM.

Read what I said again. It's not about what you know or not. This kind of precedent could easily be applied to things it shouldn't be, or rather things you don't think it should be.

try explaining all this to someone uninterested or uninformed about technology. A cubicle worker or something.

You cannot fork a service. Linux can be forked because it is software.

All the effort that surrounds it may be considered a service (often paid, sometimes subsidized). But that's distinct.

People understand very well the product vs service distinction. They notice every time they check their credit card statement.

That will be a surprise to all of the people investing lots of time giving you continuous updates and improvements.

A couple ideas:

Anti-dumping laws for well capitalized companies engaging in anti-competitive behavior

sales tax based on the cost of services

> Should free services be heavily scrutinized as an anti-competitive dirty marketing tactic, then?

To be fair, it is fairly often an anti-competitive behavior. And we are not better off for it.

> Should free services be heavily scrutinized as an anti-competitive dirty marketing tactic, then?

Perhaps if you offer a free service, you should be legally required to either post a notice "this service may switch to a paid version at any moment with a 30 days warning", or make a public promise "this service will be provided for free until 2030" (or any other year). You are allowed to increase the year later.

In the former case, you could be sued if the notice is deliberately hidden. In the latter case, not providing the free service would be considered a breach of contract.

They should be credited for immediately admitting fault [1] and reversing their decision.

A stark contrast to SalesForce's response to the bait and switch on Heroku customers..

[1] https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-ima...

I find their $60/year plan okay for unlimited private registries, OCI registries, vulnerability scanning, granular permissions with app tokens, and builds. I am fully aware I can do some of that with GitHub, I am also paying for it, it costs me $12/month with a couple of orgs and an additional contributor.

What other alternatives exist? I can do a registry with object storage backend, but I still have to host the registry container/VM itself, and I have no scanning, no ha, no permissions. I could use GitHub for everything maybe but who knows if they don’t jack up their prices? I’m also not confident about putting all my eggs in that basket. I could use quay, but that ain’t cheaper…

Docker hubs $5 per month plan is really good. It's a great service and great price.

Yes, I’d also pay $9/month to get organisations, if I needed those.

Yep, the path to monetization is always adding new value-adds, not trying to charge for the current functionality after the fact.

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.

So if someone underpriced today, they are obligated to give it to you for less forever?

Apparently all the free Docker users believe so.

I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but they believe so. You need to count this when writing down your monetization plan. People nowadays are generally extremely entitled.

I’ve run a service that pissed off free users by charging for things that used to be free.

It increased revenue and decreased costs from the tiny percentage that actually left. I think it’s win/win for any business that doesn’t rely on network effects.

Part of Docker's issue was the executed it absolutely horribly. They gave a short suspense, very little detail, and few options for migrating under such a deadline.

When people use your services in a matter assuming such, yes, I do believe so.

At the very least you should grandfather in old users and only change it for new users going forward.

Do you expect raises at work to cover inflation at least?

In my personal experience? No. I asked for 15%, knowing my co-workers made more than that, and inflation had been 9.1% YoY. I was told to be happy to get 3%.

What did I do? Found a different job and employer. Jobs are like insurance rates: you should shop around occasionally. For businesses it's a cost of doing business when trying to compete to lure new workers.

That's literally what they did with Docker Desktop!

2018-2021: Look at this awesome free way of running Docker on your Mac and Windows! We're so awesome!

2021-: Oh, that? That's $800000/mo now. Pay up!

I still don't understand what the supposed value add of Docker Desktop really was for developers who just needed to run Linux Docker containers (I know there was some value for those needing Windows or Mac containers probably). A nice UI?

At my company, we all had to uninstall Docker Desktop while they sorted out licensing and billing or whatever.

While that was happening, everyone just switched to using Docker in WSL, almost overnight. For me the setup involved changing some settings in my IDE so that it used WSL, it was one drop-down in IntelliJ. I also used VS Code and that was even easier.

The whole thing was very puzzling for me and thousands of other engineers. Many business decisions Docker makes are puzzling. But it seems to be working out for them.

> But it seems to be working out for them.

I'd say this pressure to monetize more of their services shows it's not working all that well.

What I mean is that their drive to monetize has actually produced a lot of revenue, i.e. was a success. People were predicting some kind of mass migration away from the now paid Docker products and it didn't happen.

The pressure to monetize further is just the usual endless growth stuff, it doesn't mean their previous monetization efforts actually went badly.

> People were predicting some kind of mass migration away from the now paid Docker products and it didn't happen.

Do you have any links to analytics of that sort, would be interesting to read for me, thanks in advance!

There’s nothing inherently wrong about an initial free period for a product. In many cases it’s a rational launch strategy.

On the other hand, it’s both irrational and incredibly entitled to expect that anything anyone ever gives you for free will be available for free in unlimited quantities, in perpetuity.

I think they may not fully get that they basically exposed what their real moat is, and how people might work around it.