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Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

1. If it is proprietary, we don't need it in docker. If they want to play in this ecosystem, they have to make their source free.

2. If the build process is too convoluted, we try our best to simplify it.

Building something like Mozilla Firefox might take a few hours the first time but it will not always take that long. I for one would fully support this new pro-source software distribution mechanism. We could probably use git tags to find out when we have updates if we could get people to agree on some kind of convention...

Processor vendors should love this change because every server will build all the software it needs from source.

Edit: downvoters, care to leave a note?

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> Edit: downvoters, care to leave a note?

Sure. You don't get to dictate what I run in MY docker containers hosted on MY private registry used in MY environment. If I want to run proprietary software in my docker containers, I damn well will. And I expect Docker not to work against that, if just for the reason that it works fine today, why not tomorrow?

You're more than welcome to build that from source too! Where you get the source code could still be a private, authenticated area. You could choose to never publish your docker files. That's fine. I'm just saying that we should move to a better model where if you distribute software, you should also distribute the source code (and hopefully build tools) for it.

Why is this so difficult? It does not put any constraints on the user that vendors of proprietary software haven't artificially erected.

Talk about creating more problems than you solve. If this was such a good model, why aren't all linux distros shipped with a minimal set of tools, where the users are given a "go build it all yourself" note on the box? I will tell you why; because it's a suckfest that can drag expert and non-expert linux swashbucklers into the weeds for untold amounts of time depending on the software that needs to be built.

Just because something is a bad idea today doesn't necessarily mean it will forever remain so. What we have today is far from perfect and I think any effort to branch out is a good idea. In the worst case, we won't be any worse off than we are today.

Of course, my whole idea depends on many things such as the hypothesis that processing and storage will continue to get cheaper with time. I don't know if it will be true. I hope it will though.

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