I think they have a valid complaint about that open source program Docker is running and lack of response, but the overall tone seems like they are scolding Docker for not giving away it's services for free.
I have always felt that was strange how quickly people started taking Docker for granted, while simultaneously relying on them completely but also somehow dismissing their core utility as a trivial and unsophisticated layer or something.
It's like they never really got credit from most people on HN or are worthy of getting paid, even though most everyone uses their technology.
But Docker said they would give away their services for free to all that meet the DSOS requirements. They did so in the past for this very organization and suddenly pulled the rug and went into radio silence.
The way I see it, Docker can’t both have their cake and eat it. They can’t both get the nice PR and goodwill of claiming to provide free access to open source, and also not do it (and require them to pay to keep using it in the existing capacity).
Fine if they don’t want to provide a free service, but then they shouldn’t be able to claim to do so either.
Nah, this is a bad take. There’s no excuse for them to be unresponsive to active users. Even from a purely profit-focused point of view, if Docker doesn’t want to give away free stuff, they should be encouraging/begging/cajoling users like this to convert to a paid plan. But they’re just ignoring them instead?
FWIW, I have a personal Docker license, but I avoid containers where I can (because containerizing everything by default has its own set of problems). I use containers as "very fat, stateless" binaries which are run when I need to do something (generate a webpage, take backups, etc.).
People got Docker for granted because startups and modern sysadmins absolutely despised installing software on physical or VM servers. On tech side, Vagrant was making VMs easier, plus BSD had jails, and Linux needed something similar. So they found a legit gap in the stack, and timed it well.
Who wants to spend 3 hours to install a service while they can make it appear out of thin air in 40 seconds and deal with the shortcomings and consequences later, or containerize an application, disregard hard requirements and tell "just add an X container in front" (I'm not telling that this is good, BTW).
So Docker spread like wildfire and graduated to invisible/boring tech in 3 months straight. Then when the people demanded money from developers for what they built for them, people grabbed the forks, or created literal forks of the software. I support the latter approach, not the former one.
However, if they advertise a DSOS program, they should do what it entails. Be transparent, fair and open about it.
I don’t understand why companies/people don’t respond. Apply for a job, they talk to you for months and stop suddenly. Go on multiple dates, then the person stops responding. Etc. A simple polite “we’re not moving forward with your application” email is better than silence.
How hard can it be to show some basic decency and courtesy?
I think you're underestimating how explicit rejection triggers awful behavior to seemingly way too many people, so one can be wary of releasing it, plus the fact that rejecting others is not easy for people, automating it seems dehumanizing, so the things stays as they are, so silence it is.
I've been related several times about people that wanted explicit reasons of why they've been rejected, and ending up mad at the (perceived as dishonest) hard truths they've been told, and anything said delicately can be dismissed, seen as cryptic or even displayed as hypocrisy.
Courtesy is hard, and all are not well equipped to see it when it's given.
I think the main problem is lawsuits. Say that someone is too junior or unqualified and you may end up in a lawsuit having to prove it - especially if they’re in a protected class of some sort.
I live in a place where I don’t have to worry about such lawsuits so I did give negative feedback, and most frequently the kind of people who apply to jobs they are obviously unqualified for are not the kind of people who take negative feedback well. They would rather argue with you.
The public sphere has been polluted to such an extent that these days I no longer openly advertise for jobs and instead go through contacts, luckily I don’t need many people so it remains a viable approach.
For personal matters, I prefer ghosting (receiving and giving). It's better for everyone in the long run. Just rip the bandaid off. The person has made up their mind, so discussing it just prolongs the inevitable.
For business matters, it's just common courtesy to not leave someone hanging.
If you don't like it, then why don't you use a different provider?
If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
Storage, compute, and traffic, isn't free. You've been the beneficiary of charity for years.
Yes, the open source community has relied on this implicit charity as a parasite, by exploiting whatever free services they could.
And now we're paying the price, as you say, by having DockerHub as the default provider.
My suggestion is therefore that we need independent solutions, that are fully funded as a charity, and stop relying on freemium services from corporations that fundamentally don't care about the public good.
This is really a question of framing. The other way you can look at it is: Docker has benefitted from a community adopting its products, and developing software that makes Docker more useful. As someone who sells Docker services, you benefit from a greater market size.
It's like how WordPress have benefitted from people authoring plugins – even though wordpress.org has hosted them for "free", this has been good commercial sense as it allows them to sell more WordPress.com to people.
This blog is for LinuxServer.io, who build repositories that produce free docker images, for free, paid for by donations, for a bunch of open source software. By the looks of things, they are literally a charity.
Conversely, their complaint is not "aren't docker rubbish? Let's mob 'em" - it's "heads up, something seems to be wrong and docker are not responding to anything, chances are there's trouble brewing - we're gonna start looking around and if you're depending on this, you should too"
I would say calling "the open source community" a "parasite" because they're using free services from companies that have benefited greatly and earned a lot of money from things given freely by the open source community seems weird.
Seems like a lot of people on here very concerned about those poor struggling corporations, and their exploitation by those evil open source charities. Feels like an evil political wind is blowing, wonder where that's coming from?
Your response feels in bad faith. Docker is the default registery. That gives them n amount of responsibility. Not to mention organizations should be accountable for their bad behavior. Don't give them a pass.
> My suggestion is therefore that we need independent solutions, that are fully funded as a charity, and stop relying on freemium services from corporations that fundamentally don't care about the public good.
We had that already, but none of them invented Docker.
> If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
They seem happy to pay; they were complaining (validly) about the process of renewing DSOS.
Free resources are not charity and using them is not parasitic. Without the sharing ethos there would be no modern software.
Those who can grasp the complexity of needing an ecosystem for modern technology to exist foster it and those who think strictly along the lines of profitability and short sighted morals are the unwitting beneficiaries of things they don't understand.
We do use other providers, but as stated Docker Hub is the defacto standard so it would be counterproductive for us to abandon it entirely.
We don't "want free stuff", we pay for docker hub for several accounts, but they offer and promote an Open Source program that we have been part of, that simply does not function properly, and that is our complaint.
Your attitude of "well it's free so it's fine if it's shit, just go somewhere else" is wildly unhelpful to everyone.
> If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
Docker literally offers free stuff if you follow their process. They followed the process and have gotten silence in return. Somehow that doesn't strike me as "smear them into giving you more free stuff".
Don't say you're going to do a thing if you're not going to do the thing.
Nah, I am pissed off at them because they just raised their prices by 80%. If I didn’t look into my teams config, they’d charge me $900 for 5 seats (was the minimum number of seats), instead of $360 for two. They’re fucking predatory and as soon as something cheaper comes by, I’m cancelling my subscriptions with them.
Huh? If Docker wants to make money off folks like this, they ought to be attempting to sell to them. If they want to sunset the free services for open source thing, fine, but just ignoring it is completely broken behavior. They’re ignoring the contact methods they advertise when they should be using those as leads. It’s clear Docker is a dysfunctional business at this point.
There are a few good reasons to avoid docker hub in production environments:
- free usage is capped and throttled if you exceed download limits.
- some cloud environments don't pay for docker hub access and it's easy to exceed those limits collectively. I've seen that happen on telekom cloud a few times.
- you can configure docker on your machine to use a mirror. For example https://mirror.gcr.io. Or you can setup your own mirror of course. Most cloud environments do this for you.
Using a mirror means you can continue to use images published (by others) to docker hub. And since you don't really have much of a choice about where others publish their images, using a mirror is a good workaround.
IMHO the docker solution of simply prepending images with your registry domain is actually a decent practice. I don't get websites I browse from a central repository either.
For your own stuff, you don't really need to use dockerhub. You can just run your own repository, which isn't that hard or expensive. But of course, an empty repository isn't that useful if you mainly use stuff made by others.
Btw. docker is not unique with having a corporately owned central repository of software. Annoyingly, maven central is run by Sonatype and their process for pushing stuff there is mildly convoluted. It's stupidly easy to use a simple aws or gcp bucket as a maven repository from gradle (I do this for some of my OSS projects). Or any old server with ssh access and a web server. Github also offers repositories for a lot of stuff. But getting your library on maven central just means dealing with their bureaucracy (Jira driven!) and jumping through a lot of hoops. I've been wishing somebody would beat some sense into them or would setup a (vastly) easier to use public repository for years.
It's nice that companies offer public repositories of stuff. But it's inconvenient when they start policing/taxing access to that or put up barriers to get stuff in there. Mainly because they tend to host the vast majority of interesting dependencies that you might want to use.
IMHO the ownership of such central infrastructure ideally moves to some kind of foundation with proper governance rather than some company. For docker that could be the Linux Foundation. It's not clear to me why that responsibility lies with a tiny company for the Java ecosystem that makes a rather convoluted product for hosting jar files which at this point isn't actually that widely used since there are plenty better alternatives. Nothing against them but why delegate such a big responsibility to them?
Or run no registry. Here's a port from a Dockerfile to just a vm:
FROM Debian
CMD apt-get install thing
CMD curl blabla/install.sh
Pretty much converts to:
aws-cli ec2 launch-instance
ssh user@server apt-get install thing
ssh user@server curl blabla/install.sh
In general, everytime you dispense of a high level abstraction, the solution is not to replicate the high level abstraction, but to build directly at a lower level abstraction.
If you want to replace burgers, just buy a slab of meat and put it in the fire or bake your own bread. You don't need to make preservants and buy artificial sweeteners, etc...
Docker lists a phone number on their website, perhaps you can try that?
Instead of all the snide remarks I’ll offer another possible solution:
Contact sales for Docker Business, first state your interest in the business enterprise plan, maybe even make some statements about how it would benefit you, but also during the sales/discovery/demo process note the problems you’re having as a free organization and how they have to be resolved before you can move forward.
Once the sales team prods the right people to fix your problem, continue wasting their time a little more as punishment and then tell them sorry, we went with another vendor.
Heh, I seem to have stumbled into /r/UnethicalLifeProTips
...not disagreeing with the approach. :) I swear something like half of my problems in life can be boiled down to poor/absent communication. If you're going to LARP as a grown-up company, as Docker seems to be, then you need to do the work and respond to the emails. Even from the freebie customers.
I'm absolutely stunned by all the negative comments in here bashing the Linuxserver project. "Run your own registry", "you get everything for free be grateful", and so on. What the hell is wrong with you?
They are a couple of guys trying to make software more accessible to thousands of people. Indeed it's a large project and one may question if they should get _everything_ for free. But that's not the point of this article. The article is about the absolutely horrendous behaviour of the company running Docker Hub. And I totally relate to this as I applied for a project of mine, too. How they run their open source program, it feels nothing more like presenting themselves as the big open source supporters, but in fact they make it extra hard for those who already maintain software for free.
They've ignored their application. That hardly qualifies as "horrendous".
Don't you believe in freedom?
It's fair to criticize them for monopolistic practices and creating a closed ecosystem. But if you want social goods (enforced through social norms), then the company should be publicly owned, not private.
Eh, ignoring a project isn't "absolutely horrendous", it's a little dickish at worst. They're free to accept or ignore any charity, and they're free to ignore requests for renewal. I don't know why they're not communicating (maybe they're trying to have less details publicly available for the inevitable post this would generate?) or why they'd be dropping this project entirely, but it's not like they're sending them cease & desist letters.
Many containers hosted by this project have the sole purpose of pirating media, so maybe it's not even Docker's choice to ignore the project. If they're being sued for providing piracy tools (and are smart enough to shut up about it until the lawyers clear them) it'd be stupid to explain what's going on and why. Last thing they'd need is for the copyright lawyers to make it seem like Docker is directly in kahoots with the piracy ecosystem. I'm not condemning piracy tools here, but everyone knows what you should expect if you're hosting piracy adjacent services.
It was pretty cool of them to offer DSOS to open source projects but I guess that's coming to an end if they don't even bother replying to their form anymore. But it's not like Docker is known to the public for giving other projects free hosting, the only reliable free hosting Docker provides are the containers they put under their own name spaces. It sucks people fall for the openwashing these large technology companies do, but I think people have unusually high expectations of Docker here.
If the phrase absolutely horrendous behaviour maps to this triviality instead of actual atrocities, you have gotten too deep and lost context.
I don't want to discredit any small issues by putting them into global perspectives, but there's several wars as we speak, maybe just tone down your alarm levels if you want to be taken seriously.
ilaksh|1 year ago
I have always felt that was strange how quickly people started taking Docker for granted, while simultaneously relying on them completely but also somehow dismissing their core utility as a trivial and unsophisticated layer or something.
It's like they never really got credit from most people on HN or are worthy of getting paid, even though most everyone uses their technology.
eproxus|1 year ago
The way I see it, Docker can’t both have their cake and eat it. They can’t both get the nice PR and goodwill of claiming to provide free access to open source, and also not do it (and require them to pay to keep using it in the existing capacity).
Fine if they don’t want to provide a free service, but then they shouldn’t be able to claim to do so either.
thunky|1 year ago
I didn't find the article to be scolding or offensive in their tone. It's just a straight reporting of their experience and (imho valid) concerns.
skywhopper|1 year ago
bayindirh|1 year ago
People got Docker for granted because startups and modern sysadmins absolutely despised installing software on physical or VM servers. On tech side, Vagrant was making VMs easier, plus BSD had jails, and Linux needed something similar. So they found a legit gap in the stack, and timed it well.
Who wants to spend 3 hours to install a service while they can make it appear out of thin air in 40 seconds and deal with the shortcomings and consequences later, or containerize an application, disregard hard requirements and tell "just add an X container in front" (I'm not telling that this is good, BTW).
So Docker spread like wildfire and graduated to invisible/boring tech in 3 months straight. Then when the people demanded money from developers for what they built for them, people grabbed the forks, or created literal forks of the software. I support the latter approach, not the former one.
However, if they advertise a DSOS program, they should do what it entails. Be transparent, fair and open about it.
akudha|1 year ago
How hard can it be to show some basic decency and courtesy?
tuyiown|1 year ago
I've been related several times about people that wanted explicit reasons of why they've been rejected, and ending up mad at the (perceived as dishonest) hard truths they've been told, and anything said delicately can be dismissed, seen as cryptic or even displayed as hypocrisy.
Courtesy is hard, and all are not well equipped to see it when it's given.
cjbgkagh|1 year ago
I live in a place where I don’t have to worry about such lawsuits so I did give negative feedback, and most frequently the kind of people who apply to jobs they are obviously unqualified for are not the kind of people who take negative feedback well. They would rather argue with you.
The public sphere has been polluted to such an extent that these days I no longer openly advertise for jobs and instead go through contacts, luckily I don’t need many people so it remains a viable approach.
stronglikedan|1 year ago
For business matters, it's just common courtesy to not leave someone hanging.
concerndc1tizen|1 year ago
And rejection is noisy and wasteful. And companies can't really be honest in this situation anyway, so it's pointless.
So I like the Hollywood approach: Don't call us, we'll call you.
concerndc1tizen|1 year ago
If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
Storage, compute, and traffic, isn't free. You've been the beneficiary of charity for years.
Yes, the open source community has relied on this implicit charity as a parasite, by exploiting whatever free services they could. And now we're paying the price, as you say, by having DockerHub as the default provider.
My suggestion is therefore that we need independent solutions, that are fully funded as a charity, and stop relying on freemium services from corporations that fundamentally don't care about the public good.
sealeck|1 year ago
It's like how WordPress have benefitted from people authoring plugins – even though wordpress.org has hosted them for "free", this has been good commercial sense as it allows them to sell more WordPress.com to people.
undecisive|1 year ago
This blog is for LinuxServer.io, who build repositories that produce free docker images, for free, paid for by donations, for a bunch of open source software. By the looks of things, they are literally a charity.
Conversely, their complaint is not "aren't docker rubbish? Let's mob 'em" - it's "heads up, something seems to be wrong and docker are not responding to anything, chances are there's trouble brewing - we're gonna start looking around and if you're depending on this, you should too"
I would say calling "the open source community" a "parasite" because they're using free services from companies that have benefited greatly and earned a lot of money from things given freely by the open source community seems weird.
Seems like a lot of people on here very concerned about those poor struggling corporations, and their exploitation by those evil open source charities. Feels like an evil political wind is blowing, wonder where that's coming from?
bayindirh|1 year ago
They don't whine because they didn't get DSOS status this year. They are confused because they didn't get an answer.
They want communication, not free cookies.
surgical_fire|1 year ago
Very loaded language you use, when, typically, commercial software relies on Open Source software and community efforts as a parasite.
thomasfedb|1 year ago
If Docker advertises an open source program, it’s completely fair to be critical if they’re not delivering as advertised.
whois|1 year ago
robertlagrant|1 year ago
We had that already, but none of them invented Docker.
> If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
They seem happy to pay; they were complaining (validly) about the process of renewing DSOS.
namaria|1 year ago
Those who can grasp the complexity of needing an ecosystem for modern technology to exist foster it and those who think strictly along the lines of profitability and short sighted morals are the unwitting beneficiaries of things they don't understand.
noja|1 year ago
thespad|1 year ago
We don't "want free stuff", we pay for docker hub for several accounts, but they offer and promote an Open Source program that we have been part of, that simply does not function properly, and that is our complaint.
Your attitude of "well it's free so it's fine if it's shit, just go somewhere else" is wildly unhelpful to everyone.
ascendantlogic|1 year ago
Docker literally offers free stuff if you follow their process. They followed the process and have gotten silence in return. Somehow that doesn't strike me as "smear them into giving you more free stuff".
Don't say you're going to do a thing if you're not going to do the thing.
rad_gruchalski|1 year ago
skywhopper|1 year ago
jillesvangurp|1 year ago
- free usage is capped and throttled if you exceed download limits.
- some cloud environments don't pay for docker hub access and it's easy to exceed those limits collectively. I've seen that happen on telekom cloud a few times.
- you can configure docker on your machine to use a mirror. For example https://mirror.gcr.io. Or you can setup your own mirror of course. Most cloud environments do this for you.
Using a mirror means you can continue to use images published (by others) to docker hub. And since you don't really have much of a choice about where others publish their images, using a mirror is a good workaround.
IMHO the docker solution of simply prepending images with your registry domain is actually a decent practice. I don't get websites I browse from a central repository either.
For your own stuff, you don't really need to use dockerhub. You can just run your own repository, which isn't that hard or expensive. But of course, an empty repository isn't that useful if you mainly use stuff made by others.
Btw. docker is not unique with having a corporately owned central repository of software. Annoyingly, maven central is run by Sonatype and their process for pushing stuff there is mildly convoluted. It's stupidly easy to use a simple aws or gcp bucket as a maven repository from gradle (I do this for some of my OSS projects). Or any old server with ssh access and a web server. Github also offers repositories for a lot of stuff. But getting your library on maven central just means dealing with their bureaucracy (Jira driven!) and jumping through a lot of hoops. I've been wishing somebody would beat some sense into them or would setup a (vastly) easier to use public repository for years.
It's nice that companies offer public repositories of stuff. But it's inconvenient when they start policing/taxing access to that or put up barriers to get stuff in there. Mainly because they tend to host the vast majority of interesting dependencies that you might want to use.
IMHO the ownership of such central infrastructure ideally moves to some kind of foundation with proper governance rather than some company. For docker that could be the Linux Foundation. It's not clear to me why that responsibility lies with a tiny company for the Java ecosystem that makes a rather convoluted product for hosting jar files which at this point isn't actually that widely used since there are plenty better alternatives. Nothing against them but why delegate such a big responsibility to them?
onefiveone|1 year ago
ricardbejarano|1 year ago
TZubiri|1 year ago
FROM Debian
CMD apt-get install thing
CMD curl blabla/install.sh
Pretty much converts to:
aws-cli ec2 launch-instance
ssh user@server apt-get install thing
ssh user@server curl blabla/install.sh
In general, everytime you dispense of a high level abstraction, the solution is not to replicate the high level abstraction, but to build directly at a lower level abstraction.
If you want to replace burgers, just buy a slab of meat and put it in the fire or bake your own bread. You don't need to make preservants and buy artificial sweeteners, etc...
baq|1 year ago
JFrog charges loads of money for Artifactory, btw
aaomidi|1 year ago
dangus|1 year ago
Instead of all the snide remarks I’ll offer another possible solution:
Contact sales for Docker Business, first state your interest in the business enterprise plan, maybe even make some statements about how it would benefit you, but also during the sales/discovery/demo process note the problems you’re having as a free organization and how they have to be resolved before you can move forward.
Once the sales team prods the right people to fix your problem, continue wasting their time a little more as punishment and then tell them sorry, we went with another vendor.
schmookeeg|1 year ago
...not disagreeing with the approach. :) I swear something like half of my problems in life can be boiled down to poor/absent communication. If you're going to LARP as a grown-up company, as Docker seems to be, then you need to do the work and respond to the emails. Even from the freebie customers.
openplatypus|1 year ago
We control our image registry. So should you.
Kovah|1 year ago
They are a couple of guys trying to make software more accessible to thousands of people. Indeed it's a large project and one may question if they should get _everything_ for free. But that's not the point of this article. The article is about the absolutely horrendous behaviour of the company running Docker Hub. And I totally relate to this as I applied for a project of mine, too. How they run their open source program, it feels nothing more like presenting themselves as the big open source supporters, but in fact they make it extra hard for those who already maintain software for free.
concerndc1tizen|1 year ago
They've ignored their application. That hardly qualifies as "horrendous".
Don't you believe in freedom?
It's fair to criticize them for monopolistic practices and creating a closed ecosystem. But if you want social goods (enforced through social norms), then the company should be publicly owned, not private.
jeroenhd|1 year ago
Many containers hosted by this project have the sole purpose of pirating media, so maybe it's not even Docker's choice to ignore the project. If they're being sued for providing piracy tools (and are smart enough to shut up about it until the lawyers clear them) it'd be stupid to explain what's going on and why. Last thing they'd need is for the copyright lawyers to make it seem like Docker is directly in kahoots with the piracy ecosystem. I'm not condemning piracy tools here, but everyone knows what you should expect if you're hosting piracy adjacent services.
It was pretty cool of them to offer DSOS to open source projects but I guess that's coming to an end if they don't even bother replying to their form anymore. But it's not like Docker is known to the public for giving other projects free hosting, the only reliable free hosting Docker provides are the containers they put under their own name spaces. It sucks people fall for the openwashing these large technology companies do, but I think people have unusually high expectations of Docker here.
TZubiri|1 year ago
If the phrase absolutely horrendous behaviour maps to this triviality instead of actual atrocities, you have gotten too deep and lost context.
I don't want to discredit any small issues by putting them into global perspectives, but there's several wars as we speak, maybe just tone down your alarm levels if you want to be taken seriously.
neoromantique|1 year ago
Jackosas|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
henriqueandres|1 year ago
[deleted]
honestSysAdmin|1 year ago
TZubiri|1 year ago
[deleted]
sealeck|1 year ago
hobofan|1 year ago
So are the OCI standards that grew out of Docker and now are mostly used separate from (official) Docker.
Is there even a vendor neutral VM image format?