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Comment by hhsbz | Hacker News Reader

If it's alpine with glibc I don't see what's wrong with calling it that

What's wrong with that is the reason trademarks exist: Confusion.

If something is called "alpine-glibc", it's reasonable to expect that it's by the alpine people and supported like alpine.

This, as we see here, annoys the alpine people because they now get bug reports and support requests from people using it, and have to direct people elsewhere. And when it doesn't work, they get the hit to their image even tho they've had nothing to do with it.

I think it's clear from the website that this is based on Alpine and not part of the project https://hub.docker.com/r/frolvlad/alpine-glibc/

Without context, I think what this guy is pissed off about is that this project enables people to use alpine to run proprietary software.

It doesn't outright state anywhere that it's not an official alpine product, and I don't know if everyone reads the site - many people will just copy the "FROM frolvlad/alpine-glibc" from elsewhere.

In any case, the Alpine people would know, and they apparently think it's a problem.

>Without context,

But you have context here! It has issues with symbol versioning! There is "strange behavior and possible crashes, ". This makes alpine look bad, because people think it's the alpine project's fault!

> what this guy is pissed off

Please don't assume everyone is a "guy". In this case, Ariadne is not a "he" (she uses "she"), so a male-coded word like "guy" is ill-fitting.

  FROM frolvlad/alpine-glibc

That namespacing does make it look pretty unofficial to my eyes.

But do you know if alpine does official docker images namespaced as e.g. alpine/?

Is "alpine-glibc" an official project and someone just helpfully made the image (or an image including an official glibc package)? Or is this a prerelease?

Without a deep knowledge of alpine (or now reading this post) I couldn't answer any of these questions and I'm not sure I wouldn't try to go to alpine for bug reports. I think there's a reasonable potential for confusion, even with the namespace. (but granted, I don't use docker either, so maybe this is a common thing)

And I assume the alpine people (like the author) know that they get bug reports for it and that the issues with it cause bad publicity, and that that's the context for the post and the proposal to block the package.

The answer to the first question is an obvious yes, and it's obvious to anyone that uses Docker. No deep knowledge required.

If you want Alpine, you do FROM alpine:(version).

https://hub.docker.com/_/alpine

Ah, that's good to know, thanks!

The problem is the people who use Docker but don't know anything about it. Or don't know that mixing libcs is a problem. They use this glibc package, break their containers and then blame Alpine for the breakage.

> > what this guy is pissed off

>Please don't assume everyone is a "guy". In this case, Ariadne is not a "he" (she uses "she"), so a male-coded word like "guy" is ill-fitting.

Please do not mince words, people have a tenancy to refer to their own gender identity when referring to people who's gender identity they do not know. You knew what they meant.

from the hn guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

There Are No Women On The Internet, so they got corrected. It isn't a bad faith interpretation, more like a gentle correction.

"somebody using a generic is really suggesting that women don't exist on the internet" sounds exactly like a bad faith interpretation.

I'm having a hard time here - do you really not see the connection between what I'm saying, what you're saying, and the use of a default masculine pronoun?

I see the connection, what I'm suggesting is that you knew what they meant when they said guy, meaning you did not need to suggest that they thought women didn't exist on the internet, nor did you need to suggest that they were assuming everybody on the internet is a man.

Both of those statements are bad faith.

I don't think we're operating under the same impression of bad faith. You seem to be using it to mean "an argument or line of reasoning I don't find compelling", where I am using it to mean "bringing up a line of argument or discussion for some reason other than participating".

So to circle back around on this, some people feel like using male as the default gender is rude and exclusionary. Try assuming people are women, just as an experiment, and see what sort of push back you get. This isn't in any way a bad faith argument.

It's the old Iceweasel story all over again. Sadly open-source is ill-equipped to handle naming issues.

Except it's not, as it mixes glibc with musl in ways that induce undefined behaviour you don't expect. If it was recompiling all packages to use glibc, the name would be more appropriate… but also still a trademark violation.

So, of the 49,530 images that show up with several using Alpine somewhere in the name or description... you think this is a trademark violation how? Alpine is synonymous with lightweight images. Several people and vendors use it in their image names.

I do expect images with "alpine" in the name to be based on the Alpine distro. And not some weird bastard of Alpine. And I see no problem with them asserting their trademark here.

This is merely a package you install on Alpine so it isn't a fork. Did you not do any independent research and just assume? Want to move the goalposts?

There is a difference between "python:3.10-alpine" and "alpine-glibc".

One stands for: "we use alpine" (not a trademark violation)

The other one stands for "this is alpine" (a trademark violation)

First, the repo name is alpine-pkg-glibc because it is merely a package you install on Alpine. The container name, created by a different individual is frolvlad/alpine-glibc, and they make it clear that it is based off Alpine with the glibc package installed. In fact, you can even look at the source code. This is ridiculous, and if Alpine starts going after people for using alpine in the container image name or tag then I now know what distro to avoid entirely.

  debian-stable
  debian-buster
  debian-slim

Those names are clearly not packages but distros.

  python:3.10-debian
  python:3.10-alpine

Those names are clearly packages based on a distrop

So why not:

  glibc-alpine

This would avoid confusion.

> they make it clear that it is based off Alpine with the glibc package installed

Well, seeing the number of issues opened on the official Alpine bug tracker regarding this package, it seems it's not that clear.

> if Alpine starts going after people for using alpine in the container image name or tag then I now know what distro to avoid entirely.

Alpine starts going after people for misusing the name and impacting their reputation. This is completely normal and understandable.

Marketing and communication is an important part of every projects, even open source projects, this is not exclusive to businesses. If you want people to support your project, you need to protect your image.

It makes it look like an "official" project.

Just give it a different name and explain that it's Alpine with glibc somewhere

It does not. They use Alpine in the name so people can find the image. Searching for Alpine on Docker Hub has 49,530 results. This image doesn't even show up on the first page of results. I think whoever wrote this needs to rethink how ridiculous they are being.

I assumed it did.

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