Being dishonest like this is one of the fastest way to lose customers. Please can spot it a mile away.
They should make it optional. Have the email collection form prominently there and ask users if they want to sign up to receive the newsletter, free tutorial, free e-book, whitepapers, etc.
Then also have a "No thanks, take me to the download".
While email to download is fine in most marketing contexts, it is NOT fine for open source products. If they want to collect emails they need to offer something in addition. It doesn't even have to be that much. A free e-book on how to use Docker or something.
The download page could also have a "Please support us by ..." section.
There are so many better ways to go about this.
If I download an Ubuntu Server ISO, I get my download immediately, but the page has a nice prompt to register for a whitepaper to get the most out of my new server product.
If I download the Ubuntu Desktop ISO, I still get my download immediately, but additionally I see some nice prompts about donating to support their operations.
Everything about both flows inspires trust that they aren't trying to withhold my download for the sake of selling consulting services or soliciting donations.
Actually you have to click past a "please donate some money" nagging dialogue.
It may be a little annoying (at least if you download ISOs all the time), but it's obvious what they are asking for, not to mention why.
And it's definitely not dishonest, so it doesn't tarnish their reputation as a trust-worthy company.
We are talking the price of a hipster coffee per fortnight here, but a few thousand people putting that on a recurring payment adds up.
For organisations like Docker I'm wondering if the RStudio model would be viable? The 'enterprise' subscription is something like $995 a year and can thus be budgeted for &c.
I also sometimes buy apps even if I'm not really sure I'll keep using them (sometimes just to encourage them to continue),
and keep subscribing to a newspaper even if I don't often read subscriber only content (since they sometimes have some great investigations && I want to support them but don't want to disable Adblock).
What I don't do:
- most monthly subscriptions that isn't payment for an actual service .
whether i agree with the decision or not, i am confused by this sentiment. aren’t they offering docker, for free?
There is a certain degree of trust involved in using a product like Docker since it is so critical to a businesses' operations, and I think a lot of people feel like using any kind of tracking (like mandatory registration to download) erodes that trust - we're forced to sit here and wonder what other restrictions might come in the future, or what other information they might start requiring for use of their product... and uncertainty never pairs well with infrastructure tooling that tends to be very important and very longlived within an organization.
It's not about entitlement, but it is about common convention. Docker's offering isn't unique enough for them to betray that convention.
The point of making something open source is to benefit from collaboration. Is not making the argument, "locking software distributions behind a login wall is harmful," simply a form of collaboration?
Really an honest question. I find Docker useful, and was put back also by the email/ login request, but why are they getting so much hate, compared to every other company, just because of this?
Docker is "revolutionising infrastructure" or something. It doesn't have "make heaps of money" as it's primary goal. Partly this is because open source. There's an expectation that open source is also "for the greater good".
The cardinal sin of our times is hypocrisy. Being a money-worshiping greedy capitalist bastard is fine, as long as you're open that that's what you are. Pretending to be altruistic while actually being greedy will generate all the hate.
Would you spend time out of your day to contribute to software that requires your users to sign up for someone else’s spam list?
Yeah...
The "open" in "open source" is about encouraging cooperation and collaboration. And not using lock-in or patents or walled gardens to obstruct competition.
If the altruistic aspect is still not obvious: many projects encourage a gift economy by accepting donations.
Astroturfing is really not compatible with what you called "be transparent about the product design/intentions"
However, the kind of mindset that enjoys being a greedy capitalist bastard finds it very very hard to accept the Open Source philosophy - it's all fear-based, "do unto others before they do unto you" and so "if they can rip my code off, they will", because that's what they'd do. I've experienced way too many hard conversations about open-sourcing code with this type of person.
So there tends to be a correlation between Open Source software and a co-operative mindset that would find this type of coercive marketing bullshit to be evil and reject it. This correlation becomes an expectation.
This was a bad marketing-driven move, but that's all it is.
Warning: past the home page, there is some possibly NSFW content. The game defaults to having some cartoon nudity (although there is a non-nudity mod) when the players haven't made clothes, so you might see some pictures of that if you dig around.
It's a game. He puts all the code (and assets) in the public domain. You can go to github and download it and build it for free if you want. But on the website: $20 please. He tells you exactly what you get: lifetime server account, all future updates, full source code, tech support.
Although the forum is not exactly a haven of mature discussion (in fact, it's downright awful at times), I've not even seen one complaint that "I could have got it for free". In fact, there have been several discussions where people say, "$20 is too high. Is there any way to get a discount?" and the reply is "You can download the code for free and play on these free servers". Inevitably the person says, "But I want the official version. I guess I'll pay the $20".
No idea how much money he's made so far, but for a 1 person indy game, he's done astonishingly well: https://onehouronelife.com/newsPage.php?postID=377 (description of sales in the first 2 weeks last March). According to other posts he's made in the forum (which I can't find), sales have continued to be brisk.
If you want to charge for downloading the official build of free software, then do it. Even the FSF will cheer you on (as long as you include source code ;-) ).
I love this, never occurred to me that people might mod nudity out of a game instead of into it.
Some players are really toxic. Twitter is a peaceful, loving place compared to that. No way I will spend my free time in this game.
There used to be a list of alternative servers, but seems to be gone now :-( Possibly nobody is hosting one any more. I'm tempted to do it myself, but I'm in Japan so the lag would be unacceptable anyway (I'd be playing by myself, which I do anyway...) But it's an option. If you can find a group of people to play with, it can be quite fun just to run on your own server. It takes very little CPU from my experience.
> The paradox states that if a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
I have no idea what the solution is. I suspect anyone coming up with one would win all the Nobel Peace Prizes from now until the end of time. I do think it's a useful rule of thumb that if you're not finding tolerance excruciating and infuriating at times, you're not really doing it.
Source: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...
Heck, if you'd be fine with an EU server, contact me, I'd sponsor it, including a short subdomain.
People are downloading just over 30GB/day (each weekday) per server, and the servers only seem very lightly loaded.
If the source for whatever runs the needed forums can work on ARM64, then these cheapo servers seem pretty decent so far. :)
the game overall has some very interesting features around community and cooperation, and rogue griefers are disincentivised against because the way the game scales seems to inherently require cooperation between strangers.
Hackernews is pretty good at this, very seldom I see toxic people here, yet people argue all the time when they dont agree.
This actually makes me curios, what draws you to this heavily moderated forum here?
It was the first or second thread I skimmed. No, thanks.
-- joaofnfernandes (2 months ago)
"I know that this can feel like a nuisance, but we've made this change to make sure we can improve the Docker for Mac and Windows experience for users moving forward.
As far as I can tell, the docs don't need changes, so I'll close this issue, but feel free to comment."
"In our quest to improve the service for you, the user, we're making it worse.
It was great before. It's going to be terrible now, but you're going to love the changes.
We asked our investors and they said you're very excited about it being less good, which is great news for you."
90% of changes just make things better for the user. 10% make things worse, but they’re obvious and honest and we’re okay with it.
And then 1% is the stuff like this. The Netflix/Qwikster you’re paying less but more debacle. The EA “sense of pride and accomplishment”. The Netflix (wait, why are they here twice?) show recommendations that aren’t ads that’s happening right now.
Worth it!
Which makes sense if you've got a pile of money but are trying to bootstrap a streaming service.
I expect most of that will disappear when it comes up for renewal and they've built out their original content (in the same way it did for Netflix).
What did I miss?
i.e. "We do not give one single fuck what you think about this decision, and will not be reading any of your replies."
Opt-out phone-home, telemetry, crash reporting, quality analytics, whatever you call it. That's my prediction.
My Synology personal file server started nagging about enabling telemetry and needing a privacy notice to store my files on my drive on my network. Screw that.
1. Control Panel -> Info -> Device Analytics.
https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/8mdioc/device_ana...
As for Synology, I did opt out of that as well.
It'd be great if this crap was opt in... since the industry doesn't agree, I propose we make it law.
Docker being purchased by Oracle and then users being subject to audits for the audacity of running Docker.
We all know why. There isn’t a benefit to the end-user.
see also, netflix, and twitter lately.
I really don't know why they bother uttering or writing those kinds of words. They contain no information, nobody is fooled by the lie. It is a waste of their time.
We might be on the other side of table in many other ways, or idiots as you put it. Like the way my doctor friends avoid some OTC drugs that I never even think twice before taking, or some food, or some ready made edibles. I have a friend in textile industry and when he buys clothes it's a whole new level and makes me wonder what the hell I have been wearing so far. It amazes me how he sees through all those "Giza cotton" tag-lines and gimmick features of breathability and what not that are usually followed by a (™).
Can we all not learn everything from The Internet? No, we can't and it does not make any of us an idiot.
I've had a Docker Hub account since Docker Hub was a thing and the only content I really ever get from Docker is a weekly newsletter (which you can opt out of) and notifications about the platform itself (such as any downtime reports, etc.).
I do think it's a bad idea though, mainly because for newer people getting into Docker it's a barrier of entry to overcome. I'm very suspicious of anyone asking me to register for things like this. On the other hand, I don't have insights that Docker has, so to make such a bold move, they probably have a plan.
Although they may not barrage you now, there is no telling what the future holds with stunts like this.
I think the future is pretty predictable.
In the off chance they just wake up and start slamming you with unsolicited marketing then you can click unsubscribe in the footer of their email and you'll never see another email from Docker again.
But really, I don't think Docker is foolish enough to do that. They've spent a lot of years building up their brand and business, and aren't reckless enough to put all of that at risk by relentlessly emailing their users with marketing agendas (if that's what they wanted to do they could have been doing that for years).
Docker already knows that almost everyone uses the free community edition anyways, so they really have nothing to sell to us anyways, except for maybe Docker Hub private repo access. Anyone who already downloads Docker already knows the benefits of using Docker, so they don't need to sell us on Docker as a technology. What are they going to market to us?
Lastly, let's not forget that the Docker for Windows / Mac clients have allowed you to login to the Docker Hub for a long time now and nothing bad has came from that (unexpected marketing attempts).
No, you see tons of email from everyone Docker sold your "Guaranteed Live And Active" email address to, once it verified liveness and activity by you clicking the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email. And that's assuming Docker doesn't just keep spamming you, secure in the knowledge you're reading their earnest missives and care enough to respond to them personally and by hand.
> But really, I don't think Docker is foolish enough to do that. They've spent a lot of years building up their brand and business, and aren't reckless enough to put all of that at risk by relentlessly emailing their users with marketing agendas (if that's what they wanted to do they could have been doing that for years).
If they're suddenly in a different financial position, or change leadership, or for any of a number of different reasons, they could indeed go off a cliff like that.
https://github.com/ansible/ansible-container/commit/e25bd665...
In nix, you're basically describing the whole dependency tree of your application all the way to libc. When you build your application it builds everything necessary to run it.
The great thing about it is that your CDE essentially is identical to your build system, and the builds are fully reproducible, it takes over being a build system, package manager and as mentioned CDE.
They went even further with that (I have not explored that myself yet) and used the language to describe the entire system (called NixOS) which looks like CMS is no longer necessary and also nix is used for deployment (NixOps, also did not tried it)
If you are into containers you can still deploy into systemd lxc containers, or even create a minimalistic docker image.
The disadvantage is that there is a significant learning curve, it's a new language, and it is a functional, lazily evaluated language. The language is not really that hard, but many people are not used to functional programming. It is especially popular for deployment of Haskell code, since the language is also functional and lazily evaluated.
We have been working on Flockport [1] that supports LXC containers and provides orchestration, an app store, service discovery and repeatable builds. It's still in early preview and we have not started proper outreach but it may be worth looking at.
Ubuntu also provides the LXD project that provides some orchestration across servers.
It's seems possible to get IPv6 working through alternative orchestration though. eg Theres a guide on getting it working with Kubernetes and Calico.
But if you're looking for something that's production grade IPv6 - eg people can work out WTF is wrong when problems hit - it's probably not there yet. At least, not for small teams that I can tell. ;)
Sounds pretty married to me.
See https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-container/getting_started.h...
The problem is that it's almost never that.
It's not "we're unable to pay our bills". It's "we've got more money than we need already, but we think we could get a lot more this way".
You think, say, Netflix is a struggling business and that's why they have to put more ads than before? No. In a capitalist system, leaving money off the table is increasingly unjustifiable as the number you're leaving off grows. Docker absolutely is in that same situation.
"Hey, look at all these downloads CE is getting. We need to start following up with these users to try and promote Enterprise and other products. Start capturing emails at the point of download."
1) Users think they are free
2) They are not actually free
The result is of course stuff like this.
The community is expressing a desire for companies to be be honest and upfront about these sorts of issues (i.e., monetization). Refer to the post you responded to for more information.
The guys who act like "it's only about the lies" are usually not decision makers, but it's important to be able to have enough a story that the decision makers don't get their thoughts contaminated by the perennially negative.
I think Docker will be fine with what they're doing. This is a storm in a teacup. But they should've bundled it with other features like auto-updates or something.