Why aren't more licenses like this? What are the downsides? Traction? I am thinking how Adobe has made it easy to crack Photoshop so that students once they graduate demand Photoshop and Adobe Suite for their workflow.
Docker should have been smarter.
I get your intention, but monetizing infrastructure and systems code is pretty hard.
It sort of is, in a way.
We have an on-prem k8s cluster that is small enough to fly under the 100pulls/6hrs limit.
I believe even our Gitlab CI/CD runners could manage.
Even so, we have setup our own internal repo mirror.
I wonder this too. I started using drone.io for CI early this year and part of the reason was because of their no BS license where anyone making under $1 million could just use it.
Unfortunately they got bought by Harness who's already slicing it into tiers [1] so it'll turn into the same feature roulette crap (like GitLab) that I was trying to avoid.
If I had input on the business model of some of these companies I'd say that every effort should be made to give individuals and small developers a competitive advantage if they choose to use your product and a big part of that is getting rid of tiers for technical features.
A really good example of how not to do it is GitLab IMO. Look at the way they reserve container scanning [2] for their top tier. Remind me why only large enterprises need security. The implementation of that feature isn't even good IMO.
Scanning an image at build time is the wrong time to do it. It should be more like Harbor [3] where it's a scheduled scan by the registry and everyone should have access to it. The feature tiering could be done via the deployment, traceability, and monitoring of the containers. As a small developer I can do those things by hand because I know everything that's going on and what's currently deployed. I can track it in a spreadsheet if needed. Large developers need a way for (ex:) a director to log in and get a report for all the vulnerable images running in production.
As is, it's a checkbox feature, so I can see why it makes sense to have it in an enterprise tier. At a certain level it's about checking the box and covering your ass, so if / how it works doesn't even matter at that point. As long as you can claim due diligence that's all that matters, right?
I mean GitLab is making $0 from me right now, so why not just give away everything until a company has 5 developers or $1 million in revenue or something. Make it so appealing that it would be stupid for small developers to use anything besides GitLab because it would be impossible to compete in terms of productivity.
As it is, I hate dealing with the feature tiers so much that I gave up and switched to Gitea with other self hosted solutions for CI, Registry, etc.. I want to spend my time writing code, not trying to figure out what features I can use with my current plan.
1. https://harness.io/pricing/
2. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/contain...
3. https://goharbor.io/docs/2.1.0/administration/vulnerability-...
And I want to spend my time writing code, not maintaining dozens of self-hosted applications, each with their own kinks and requirements.
What I dislike about comparing features is finding out what's missing and not supported at all, in any tier. Many of these are "you'll know it when you see it" kind of features. For example, they will list hardware 2fa as their feature, but they won't mention you're limited to only one key per account. Some of those are tiny inconveniences, others are deal-breakers. And you keep finding them, but you've already organized your workflow and switching to another vendor might be costly, mostly in time.