'Docker is Deleting Open Source Organisations' 34
Alex Ellis: Earlier this month, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an "organisation", telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers. As far as we know, this only affects organisation accounts that are often used by open source communities. There was no change to personal accounts. Free personal accounts have a a 6 month retention period. Why is this a problem?
1. Paid team plans cost 420 USD per year (paid monthly)
2. Many open source projects including ones I maintain have published images to the Docker Hub for years
3. Docker's Open Source program is hostile and out of touch
Why should you listen to me? I was one of the biggest advocates around for Docker, speaking at their events, contributing to their projects and being a loyal member of their voluntary influencer program "Docker Captains". I have written dozens if not hundreds of articles and code samples on Docker as a technology. I'm not one of those people who think that all software and services should be free. I pay for a personal account, not because I publish images there anymore, but because I need to pull images like the base image for Go, or Node.js as part of my daily open source work. When one of our OpenFaaS customers grumbled about paying for Docker Desktop, and wanted to spend several weeks trying to get Podman or Rancher Desktop working, I had to bite my tongue. If you're using a Mac or a Windows machine, it's worth paying for in my opinion. But that is a different matter. Having known Docker's new CTO personally for a very long time, I was surprised how out of touch the communication was. More: Docker: We apologize. We did a terrible job announcing the end of Docker Free Teams..
1. Paid team plans cost 420 USD per year (paid monthly)
2. Many open source projects including ones I maintain have published images to the Docker Hub for years
3. Docker's Open Source program is hostile and out of touch
Why should you listen to me? I was one of the biggest advocates around for Docker, speaking at their events, contributing to their projects and being a loyal member of their voluntary influencer program "Docker Captains". I have written dozens if not hundreds of articles and code samples on Docker as a technology. I'm not one of those people who think that all software and services should be free. I pay for a personal account, not because I publish images there anymore, but because I need to pull images like the base image for Go, or Node.js as part of my daily open source work. When one of our OpenFaaS customers grumbled about paying for Docker Desktop, and wanted to spend several weeks trying to get Podman or Rancher Desktop working, I had to bite my tongue. If you're using a Mac or a Windows machine, it's worth paying for in my opinion. But that is a different matter. Having known Docker's new CTO personally for a very long time, I was surprised how out of touch the communication was. More: Docker: We apologize. We did a terrible job announcing the end of Docker Free Teams..
Docker (Score:2)
Actually, you do need docker (Score:2, Funny)
If you're a webshit, the AWS instance VM is invisible to you. You need docker to pretend your collection of piles of webshit has some semblance of repeatability. Nevermind that upgrading any component inside the "containerised" "stack" usually breaks so many other things that you can do little but ask the original "devops" webshit to rebuild the thing from scratch. But you can stuff multiple docker shitsacks on your AWS instances and pretend.
So yeah, docker is a vital part of the webshit "ecosystem".
Re:Docker (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Why VM since you have use AWS Bare Metal? (sarcasm)
Tssk, tssk, amateur, it's time for your own data center with k8s or mesos
Time to go on over to Quay then... (Score:2)
Thankfully there is at least one big well known alternative container registry for this sort of containers... Though I'm still not sure that this particular approach to containers (each image is everything, no ability for people to 'patch' libraries contained therin) is good, it's good that there are alternatives.
Dockers went away when containers were invented. (Score:2)
Dockers went away in the 60s, when containers were invented.
They all got fired.
So Docker is dying! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Netcraft confirms it.
Dockers died away in the 1960s (Score:1)
Dockers died away in the 60s, when containers were invented.
They all got fired.
So when will they delete AlpineLinux? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am waiting to watch them collapse their own entire product offering by removing AlpineLinux ;)... Much of their commercial offerings, their buildx engine, etc, all seem to use AlpineLinux generated images...
Re: (Score:3)
Lie down with dogs... (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFS:
I'm not one of those people who think that all software and services should be free
Then why are you sobbing to the media about an unfree service doing what unfree services do, kid? Shut up and pay the fee, and maybe think twice before evangelizing closed systems in the future.
Re: (Score:2)
This. Firstly it's not a big fee. They aren't doing a rich cashgrab here. And secondly this affects only a very tiny miniscule proportion of people as most Docker organisations are in fact ... organisations.
Re: (Score:2)
This only one in a long string of organizational monetization missteps. They couldn't monetize their way out of a wet paper bag with a sharp machete.
You needn't apologize for them. They're almost poster-boyz for how to screw up an excellent concept, then double-down (hold my beer while I battle K8s).
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, Docker laid off 85% of their staff in 2019 and went into "restructuring." I don't think they're doing a "cash grab." They're doing an "oh shit, we've burned money for ten years, now our investors think we should at least think about breaking even."
The bait phase is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Next comes switch.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Next comes switch.
Yeah if you have no idea what is going on you may assume that. Now back in reality:
a) why would they provide enterprise services outside of the enterprise service package?
b) why would they enact a bait and switch on an insanely miniscule number of users for a miniscule fee?
c) why do you feel entitled to what is clearly a feature provided for commercial purposes?
"Why should you listen to me?" (Score:3)
"I was one of the biggest advocates around for Docker, speaking at their events, contributing to their projects and being a loyal member of their voluntary influencer program "Docker Captains". I have written dozens if not hundreds of articles and code samples on Docker as a technology."
None of that actually answers the question.
Re: (Score:2)
long live podman! (Score:5, Informative)
The Docker is dead, long like the Podman! (Score:2)
Just move to podman (Score:1)
Slashdot: outdated news for nerds (Score:4, Informative)
They apologized and reversed this yesterday.
Stupid Business decisions (Score:4, Interesting)
It's probably due to someone at docker saying "We need to maximize our revenue. Make sure that no companies are using our service for free, and upgrade them to a paid subscription."
So a manager writes a ham-fisted PDF and sends out an email, and then we get this backlash.
An alternative way of going about this would be to insert a clause into an updated TOS that would allow Docker to use the open-source projects by name in advertising campaigns. This would be so benign, that of course all of their users would agree to it. Then Docker could advertise "look how many open-source projects use our service", gain more customers, and even retain and/or gain the admiration of the open-source community.
Man, some businesses really make bad decisions.
Re: (Score:2)
"We need to maximize our revenue. Make sure that no companies are using our service for free, and upgrade them to a paid subscription."
Yeah you'd think that too except that this change affected only a handful of people to the tune of only a couple of hundred dollars and wouldn't even fill a petty cash drawer.
But really you don't need to guess. You can just read the links and realise this was part of a restructuring.
"The Docker Free Team subscription was deprecated in part because it was poorly targeted. In particular, it didn’t serve the open source audience as well as our recently updated Docker-Sponsored Open Source program, the la
Decentralised Docker Hub? (Score:2)
Maybe the alternative would be a decentralised Docker hub, where you the images are stored at different providers and simply indexed by said site.
At the same time can anyone suggest viable alternative business models that balance the needs and budgets of open source projects, with the cost of hosting the docker images?
Could docker images be made to use less storage?
Re: Decentralised Docker Hub? (Score:3)
Note that container registries are possible to be hosted elsewhere. Docker hub is popular because docker configures by default. Podman for example will generally have Quay enabled too.
As to having them use less storage, that's simple enough, use traditional application packaging. The "app brings it's own os" model throws out the value of things like shared libraries and assets, and that is going to fundamentally raise the requirements (also it makes relatively simple inter process communication a nightma
Always Been Against Docker : ) (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I knew it was a bait-and-switch thing. Still, I am sorry to everyone who gave them a chance.
I'm not sorry for them. I envy them. Docker did after all reverse their decision to delete organisations (before this story came out), and also provide an expanded range of services from their free tier (which was lost in the news because a handful of users setup organisations and cried boohoo to the media about it).
Any facts to support that claim? (Score:2)
The claim is that they were targeted because they were open source, but the facts related by the claimant indicate they were targeted because they had an "organization" type of account.
Appology Updated (Score:2)
Looks like they've backtracked entirely:
UPDATE: As of March 24, 2023, Docker has reversed its decision to sunset the “Docker Free Team” plan. Read our new blog post [docker.com] for details.
Interesting that they've apparently got a "Docker-Sponsored Open Source Program", my suspicion is whomever was pushing this saw the program and just assumed that meant Open Source projects wouldn't be impacted (I suspect most projects weren't even aware of it).