Hacker News Reader

Comment by darren0 | Hacker News Reader

This is an amazing announcement, but... The beta requires a NDA. The source code is also not available. This gives the impression that this will be a closed commercial product and that really takes the wind out of my sails.

View on HN

The NDA is just residue from the alpha teating phase, we'll remove it.

We will open-source all the components individually, to make them easier to reuse elsewhere. That requires work to do properly.

Lastly, Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows will be free.

NDA is removed.

From the blog post: "Many of the OS-level integration innovations will be open sourced to the Docker community when these products are made generally available later this year."

Yes, I'll be excited when the lower bits will be open sourced, as that is what I care most to see (I don't even run Mac/Windows). But in an era when even Microsoft is open sourcing and giving developer tools away for free, the idea that this won't be an open source product is odd.

We want to open-source the system components separately, so that you can use them separately from docker if you wish. That is different (and more useful) than just dropping a big xcode project on github and letting you dig for the gems. We want to do it right which takes extra work.

But not all? Any comment from the Docker folks on here? I thought docker was open source.

Yes, all the components will be open-sourced.

Why? Great products are worth paying for.

Nothing about the freedom of the software has to do with whether or not you compensate the authors for creating it.

If you take free software and never consider paying its developer for making it, despite them providing you freedom, choice, and a degree of trust in the software you can not have with proprietary code, then you are the kind of person to blame for why proprietary software is so rampant today.

For example, I donate $200 to the Document Foundation every year to match the cost of an annual subscription to Office 365 plus a 33% bonus for respecting my freedom.

As a practical matter, few people pay for open-source software. In theory, the two issues are orthogonal, but in reality, they are not.

ahem SUSE and RedHat are examples of companies that sell free software.

There are no plans to charge for it though.

Expecting open source doesn't mean I wouldn't pay for it. I co-founded a company that is fully open source, so I do understand that money needs to exchange hands to keep this industry flowing. I just believe in freely sharing ideas.

> freely sharing ideas

You mean freely sharing execution? The source is not the idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com