The business license costs $21/month, probably less in reality.
Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250
Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time
Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation
The concept of opportunity cost is completely lost on a lot of business leaders.
It’s not just the $250/yr/dev, but rather the requirements to create a new vendor in the ERP morass, to get approvals for an exception to the standards for payment terms (and/or methods), any requirements for vetting vendors, etc.
If you’re selling to an enterprise, don’t charge just above whatever the “employees can put it on their card without approval”. If you’re going to exceed that, you might as well exceed it by a lot. (If you’re going to make every developer file an expense report every month, I can readily prefer to do a lot of command line typing rather than filing an expense report… If I automate that for a lot of my fellow devs, I get to do something fun and be a minor folk hero.)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
Oh some JavaScript graphing library is expensive. Let’s roll our own!
Heroku meets our needs 100% let’s spend millions to switch to K8 and have a much worse experience.
Free tools have a predictable and stable cost.
I have probably been burned more times from free tools over the years, but the scars aren’t as deep. It’s just a shrug and hoping the other project works when the first doesn’t.
Unless they suddenly turn from free into a $21/month per person fee.
Docker Desktop was free, now it's $21/month, what will it cost next year when Docker needs more money?
- Reviewing purchases should put some reasonable controls around how much software you can accumulate. Adding to the tech stack has maintenance costs, and you don't really want to do it without some sort of review. In this case, it's not the dollars as much as the fit.
- With SaaS tools in particular, there are often privacy or security concerns. Those teams should review. Probably want legal's eyes on it to get the right terms in place as well. Again, less about the dollars here, and more about the agreement, risk, required disclosures (subprocessor, etc), and those kinds of factors.
- On the spend itself, you'd be surprised how this adds up, especially if folks are signing multi-year deals and not bothering to negotiate licensing. Remember, if it's easy for you and me to buy, it's easy for everyone else to buy too, and it multiplies quickly.
Now, on one-off hardware purchases and such, I agree it should be a lot easier. At least at the startup I work at, anything under $500 is just an expense report, so just make sure your manager is cool with it and go for it. But there are considerations here also around stuff coming in that IT or facilities then needs to support - obligating their time with your purchase is something you need to agree on or avoid.
EDIT: Also as someone else pointed out, grift on purchase orders is easy without any oversight.
A lot of it is that opportunity cost really isn't the problem of many business units. I spent a week building a crappy version of codecov for our few repos.
Dev won't get in trouble for that because opportunity cost isn't a thing for us as a cost centre.
Buying anything on my organization costs something around $10k. Add your price to this to discover the total we are spending.
That's on financial cost. The opportunity cost of stopping technical people to handle the technical details of an acquisition is just huge, and larger the most differentiation there is on the market.
$21 is nothing for a one-time spend.
$21 per month per employee is now $252/year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before that person can get started.
It's not bad when it's just a couple key pieces of software, but it doesn't take long before every engineer has some mix of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses and you're on the phone with a different vendor every week doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price they're asking.
Soon, all of those "cheap" tools have added up to $1000/month or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of the time. And it's terrible.
When the tool isn't easily replaceable, you deal with it. I'm not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate toward the latter.
This! I've always said that a bit reason for FLOSS to win over the internet server-side is because scaling fast and juggling livenses is just too hard. Especially with the prying eyes of Oracle/MSFT/etc's powerful legal teams and hidden "phone home" code.
Going with a LAMP stack was just to simplest way to keep moving at speed.
Then engineering can spin up loads of instances to test stuff and scale fast with minimal hassle, and it'll be the purchasing team playing catchup later, no longer in the decisionmaking path.
There’s a dozen services I could buy for work that would probably improve things dramatically, for very little cost, but almost nothing is worth the pain of “get sign off. Get sign off again. Fill in paperwork. Wait n weeks. Get more sign off. Wait even longer for finance to do their thing.”
Docker doesn’t need to actually do that to run afoul of policies based on the scar tissue from those other vendors. Simply going from “you can use it without being sued” to “we have to pay people to make sure we’ll win” will increase the perceived cost at many large shops.
Without a contract, it's hard to disagree with the policy types who are going to ask what protects the organization if that happens. Once you go down this path even a little, the barriers to entry at large organizations go up since you have to look at it from the perspective of both the upfront cost and possible future cost / off-ramps.
1. https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston/status/143272649295845376...
When they are merged into some other big company, that company will look to milk the cow by going after license compliance. It happens every time.
They ended up telling me to forget about it.
I guess that perhaps they only want to target large businesses.
But arguing for $252/yr times a thousand developers (in the office I work in, at least; we have others elsewhere) is just untenable. If the value was there for us, then we could get it signed off on, but there's no way to build that value because now it's too expensive to get started.
A year or two ago I bought a personal license to Ubuntu FIPS after being urgently asked to debug an issue w/ Python's OpenSSL bindings. Unsurprisingly it turned out that my company had an enterprise license, and had I known whom to contact (which I didn't), I could have gotten a license key in a couple of days. But why waits days and potentially many thousands of dollars of time when I could buy a license now and get started immediately?
Frankly, it's weird how Silicon Valley employees making obscene amounts of money balk at personal expenses as if they're some minimum wage employee being victimized by their employer nickel-and-diming them. But that's just me. In fact, except at startups, Silicon Valley corporations neither expect this nor even give you credit for taking such initiative.
For personal expenses (meaning expenses for my own hobby projects, not "personal expenses" to mean business expenses paid by an employee as you have used it), $21 would be a quick decision. But using that same $21 to shore up a faulty requisition process? Nope, not at all.
I decided long ago not to worry about such expenses because 1) the engineer in me hates this inefficiency and urges me to fix or work around it (depending on your perspective), 2) navigating bureaucratic red tape takes a personal toll, and as someone who is paid well I don't mind at all spending a trivial amount of money for my own wellbeing, even if its for work, and 3) as someone who has worked in startups and even founded one, I've both been in a position where I was expected to take on such expenses and expected others to do the same (at least as an initial matter[1]).
[1] The dilemma is that unless the purchaser faces some risk of incurring the expense themself, they're not as incentivized to consider the reasonableness of the purchase. The solution is either 1) requiring permission beforehand, or 2) hiring more mature employees who understand the nature of the dilemma and who have already factored this responsibility and risk into their negotiated compensation. The latter doesn't scale, though, which is why large organizations invariably regress to the former.
You’re making life harder for everyone else!
It also allows small creators to survive.
I'm working on hybrid mobile apps again after a long break. The number of essential packages in both the Ionic/Capacitor/Cordova and React Native ecosystems that are "looking for maintainers" (think: camera functionality) and have long lists of issues is frankly astounding, given the number of users of said packages.
An expectation to pay so the maintainers can maintain is a good thing in my book.
So where does it stop? Is 250$ ok but 1000 isn’t?
I think we’ve set the line just fine, if you want to cover opex out of pocket, cool. But don’t try to put that on people who can’t afford it.
Docker arguably should be charging more for it. The friction between $0 and $21/month is higher than the friction between $21/month and $60/month in a lot of ways.
Having worked with procurement departments I can understand very well why employees should never be able to make purchasing decisions without someone from procurement in the loop.
How long does it really take to set up the VM and port forwarding to have most of what people care for from docker desktop locally. A couple of hours. Let's say 3. So cost $360.
How long does it take to go through your average large company requisition process? Probably 2 hours over multiple weeks. So that's $84 for the license at the $7 tier, and $240 for the time spent dealing with the corporations self inflicted tedium. But hey, $324, still technically cheaper.
But then there's the opportunity cost of waiting two weeks to install fucking docker. I think we can all agree that's worth more than $36.
So I'll be looking at alternative solutions rather than deal with the corporate purchasing bureaucracy. Even if the purchasing manager was reacting in real time I'd probably consider it worth $36 not to deal with the process.
that's how it's worked for me - in my last job spent 3 weeks waiting for a Qt License, Intel compiler license, MSVC license...
Real talk: Just hire people. The US especially has a huge amount of college educated people who struggle to find a job that matches their chosen education. If you can't find someone that matches the exact profile, pay for an education and training. As a company, don't accept just winging it - especially not if you have enough money.
What situation, being trapped? I'm not sure what size has to do with it. Are small corporations maybe more ... agile?
If the org's been thoughtful to in advance, it's at the level of being almost an operational risk - all of engineering uses this tool, tool's licence or pricing might change, retooling has an associated cost and down-time.
Not sure how would that work for a desktop tool. It's in them to figure that out though
Not where I work at. IT opex are a recurring cost item with no visible benefits, so are squeezed dry at every annual budget review. Capex are seen as investments into something new and good and their impact on the bottom line is amortized over several years.
Legal alone will spend months looking at run-of-the-mill software contacts trying to negotiate absurd concessions from vendors in situations where they clearly have no bargaining power.
We can spend a lot of money on Oracle for their profoundly obtuse products though.
I got front-line seats at a company with tens of millions in revenue try to get payment processor to remove escrow terms from the contract.
Said company got blocked at tier 2 support. They refused to escalate for a company who wasn’t a customer, especially when legal stuff was involved. Tier 2 had a script specifically for people like us.
I regret not bringing popcorn to that phone call.
In short: “Those aren’t our terms; those are the terms of a billion-dollar bank. Sign it or leave.”
They were very much not impressed with our claim to being the second-largest widget maker in the world.
Example: I only have to revisit licensing once a year, to create a new 12 line purchase order. It's still a pain but I prefer purchase orders vs dealing with credit cards. In addition, querying expense history for purchase order lines provides far more detail vs querying a credit card platform. Credit card history tends to go into a black hole.
One possible hitch...Some companies might restrict Accounts Payable from receiving purchase orders for separation-of-duties reasons.
I asked if I could just pay it myself, but was told that would violate the IT department guidelines and possibly an SLA too, so I just sat there for a month, reminding everyone at the daily stand ups I was blocked. I couldn’t believe it.
I was not the only one who was tied in red tape there, it was indeed normal.
This company was making 600 million a year in profit.
When you've spent enough time in the IT Department, you'll see companies demand that you "cut laptop costs" or similar. Because when you're buying 250 laptops a year, the people with the budgets go "OMG we're spending half a million a year on laptops". So changes are made to the configuration, maybe small SSD but often times it'll be something like less RAM, or slower CPU - because purchasing controls aren't that fine. Great, you've now cut $200 per laptop and the money people are excited to see you've saved $50,000/year.
Do they understand that now there are 250 people, which probably all cost more than $100,000/year, whom aren't quite as efficient as they could be? Nope. And they don't care. The budget says you get X. The personnel cost is attributed in some other category not to be touched.
Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."
Lastly the per-employee cost adds up. It's $11/mo for SSO. $18/mo for email suite. $19/mo for Gitlab. $14/mo for Jira. $5/mo for Confluence. $3/mo just to put SAML on Jira & Confluence. $8/mo for Password vault. $12/mo for Slack. $17/mo fro Zoom. $17/mo for Lucidchart. $12/mo for Laptop MDM. That's not everything an employee needs, heck it doesn't even cover HR products (Workday? 15Five? Applicant Tracking?), Training (probably a couple of those), EDR/AV for laptops, and dozens of other smaller services. Sure adding another $21/mo isn't going to change the number a lot on an individual basis, but it adds up really fast when you multiply it out across all your Developers.
And don't forget. How do you rationalize that your container software costs more than your source code control solution? One of those two things you can very easily live without... and it's Docker.
Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name:
"subscription fatigue"
I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around.
I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee.
So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it.
Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld.
Edit:
> Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget."
Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem.
But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.
So it's less about 10$ and more about: "I understand what a wireless mouse is and it doesn't look mission critical to me."
"No idea what those items on that AWS bill mean, but I'll probably be better off not asking"
You have three rational choices: 1. Play the game, 2. Keep your head down, 3. Quit and move to a company that doesn't play those games.
Sitting around complaining that a big company has crappy inefficient processes is like complaining that water is wet. A complete waste of time and makes you look incompetent to other people in the company who are playing the game. These inefficient processes end up optimizing for people who know how to talk the code and cultivate the right relationships. Take advantage of that.
First you need something core to start a bill around. Let's make a law that makes it easier to buy guns.
But no one is going to vote for that, so let's give it a name you CAN'T say no to. It will henceforth be known as "The Child and Family Home Protection Act".
Great we have a cool name and we have a law significant enough to send to the floor of congress. Now let's get enough people to promise to vote for it so we don't waste our time. Oh, Congressman X says that he would vote for it as long as we add another law about funding polar bear research. Sure, whatever just add it in, we need the votes. Congresswoman Y says she will vote for it if we add a law about requiring masks at church. We need the votes, tack it on. Congressman Z has been trying to get more tanks sent to Afghanistan for nearly a decade, if we add that in I bet he will vote for out law too.
Then these things get bundled up and sent to the floor where people vote on laws with fun marketing names added to them.
The same thing happens in business. You start off with a core project like a new ERP system. Give it a complex sounding name that no one in accounts payable will say no to. Then we add in a bunch of computers into the budget that we have been trying to get for 2 years. Add a new printer. Throw in some docker desktop licenses for our developers, and then bundle it up and send it to Accounts Payable. Bam, now you have docker desktop licenses and new computers. You're welcome.
Of course, that fortune 500 is going to pick up the phone and demand to pay 1/4 of that (and they'll probably get it). Enterprise sales is fun
If it's a core part of my job and the best option available, it'd be worth it, but if there's any reasonable alternative, I'll go download that today instead of wading through all of the lawyers and approvals and compliance to use something slightly better.
If you already have a live deployment then the company's bigger fear is the a risk of switching to a completely new infrastructure and they'll all of a sudden push the paperwork quickly to stay on their existing codebase.
I’d rather investigate an alternative like running it on a VM than deal with that. Actually I’d rather shave my face with some mace in the dark than deal with that.
Tech companies? No, they will probably cough up until they have another solution.
IT departments in non-tech companies? Yes. I fully expect a circus there. Many won't have known it was being used, purchasing will have their ego bruised by a company "hijacking" them and won't want to pay, and so on.
No, it costs $21/user/month.
> Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k/year assets over a very core piece of software for $250/year?
I work for a big enterprise that is currently going through a transition that is simultaneously a cloud transition and a transition to more critically consider tooling with license management overhead (which for a $21/seat license, is probably a significantly larger cost in a big, bureaucratic enterprise than the license cost itself.)
That said, there's a good argument that the things that you get for that $21/seat are things many enterprises will find are still worth the license cost + license management overhead. On the other hand, most of that is stuff that doesn't scale with number of developer seats, so a subscription model that doesn't work on that basis and therefore doesn't impose the kind of license management overhead that per-seat licensing does would probably net Docker more revenue while imposing less total costs on enterprises.
Do you guys not realize that I know that? I did the maths standardized to one seat.
I’m not also suggesting that the entire engineering spend for 100+ person companies is $250k/year.
Do the analysis on a per unit cost because that’s how life works: per unit cost of human capital and per unit cost of software vs. per unit value creation.
Did you not read the rest of the post? I think you knew the license fee was per seat, I think you just think you failed (and fail, still) to understand the significance of that on the actual cost to the business imposed, of which the license fee itself is only a fraction.
Being so cheap actually complicates the matters even more, since the finance people don't really want to mess with purchases less than $5,000, even though it is their own rule that requires all software to go through them regardless of cost. It just means they won't be willing to help very much.
USD 21 per user/month + bulk discount is nothing.
If companies want to roll their own they can, but most won't. Docker Desktop adds a lot of value if only by removing the hassle for quick os-agnostic development.
In a world where podman exists, what's the point of docker on dev machines anyway?
Pretty sure they're used for more than that.
The biggest showstopper for podman is that it runs entirely in userspace on Linux. Having said that, I use it as a drop-in replacement for Docker and it's only become better in the past year. This is somewhat irrelevant to the Docker Desktop product, as podman doesn't provide a nice packaged up solution, but you can use podman on Windows and Mac as long as you have a Linux host available, either as a guest VM or as a machine _elsewhere_ on the network, see [1]. I only use Linux if I can, and the ability to run images without having to run a daemon with root privileges is a very big bonus for me, but it might not be for you. Now I do wonder, how hard would it be to declare a minimal nixOS VM for running as one's podman host :)
As I see it, that's the whole selling point. Need to have something with limited rights or build a container without root? Podman is the way to go.
Just `brew install podman`.
For Windows, Podman is available on many distributions in WSL2.
Why do you believe that? Docker's "root by default" design decision is the bane of Docker. Podman is even described as Docker done right in that regard.
Even for myself flying solo I can use my old desktop as a Podman server, conserving RAM/CPU in my development env. Sounds good to me.
It needs to have parity in all other pseudo-layers (3rd party tool support, support plans, OS support, someone to sign a contract with, compliance tools, etc.) We know most of these go unused or have no real meaning to devs, but they unlock enterprise procurement.
I believe podman has a linkage to RedHat which may actually bring all of the things that procurement want to hear, but the question is whether the door is open to RedHat, or not. Procurement departments can be fickle, preferring Oracle for everything or the other way round trying to eradicate Oracle while permitting a combination of others. It's all politics based on previous experiences and opinions in the end.
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-build.1.htm...
> --cache-from
> Images to utilize as potential cache sources. Podman does not currently support caching so this is a NOOP.
Not sure the bare docker daemon VM wrapper has a defensible moat though. Maybe this does more in Windows?
I did not know that running basic Linux VMs was something you could do without downloading VMware or Virtual Box - which isn't as easy as just running a few scripts (especially in corporate environments where Brew and other tools might not be so readily available to all employees).
> downloading VMware or Virtual Box - which isn't as easy as just running a few scripts (especially in corporate environments where Brew and other tools might not be so readily available to all employees).
Docker Desktop needs the same level of access, because it runs virtual machines. If you could install it on your own, can't you install those on your own? If it was centrally managed, then IT can switch to one of those programs instead.
> Does Mac have any sort of built-in VM framework like Hyper-V?
Yosemite added Hypervisor.framework, I guess?
Two, actually. Hypervisor.framework [0] to build virtualization solutions on top of a lightweight hypervisor, without third-party kernel extensions, and Virtualization.framework, to create virtual machines and run Linux-based operating systems.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor?languag...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization?lan...
Literally the first non-title element in your link. Just because the client is cross-platform doesn't mean the entire solution is turn-key cross-platform.
I was going to say that installing Podman on macOS/Windows leaves the VM as an exercise to the user, but per another comment, there's podman-machine[1], a new-ish built in to setup a VM. However, it's apparently already deprecated (?) and recommends simply 'Vagrant' as an alternative, so seemingly setting up the VM is back to being a user exercise for Podman?
Most of the problems that devs are facing with docker are not actually docker but this layer that tries to abstract the VM. So in the end, it's quite common that you have fix things in the VM or get rid of it. I don't know if docker on WSL2 makes the matter better, none of the devs in my team using Windows can use it because of the memory usage bug.
I don’t think that thinking like an engineer will help you understand the value add here.
That's not how corporations work.
I work remotely for large corporation (over 100k employees) and it wastes on average an hour of my productivity every day on stupid stuff. For example my office PC becomes unavailable every time it gets an update, at least once a week. They force restart during working hours. If there is somebody in the office I can call them to reboot it, if not I have to drive there. Everybody has the same problem. Meetings are disrupted, plans are thrown in disarray, people are loosing sometimes entire day of work.
The problem has been known before covid and has not been solved.
Any normal logical person would throw resources into solving the problem, but the people responsible just say they are busy and why is that a big problem if you can just press reboot?
Not just "think" - I know for a fact.
Finance refuses to spend money if there is a "free" alternative, and Architecture rejects all software that isn't OSS licensed without a lengthy review process. It would take us at least 3 months to get approvals and POs for all the devs, if it even got approved, but more likely it would be in "batches" of licenses, further delaying roll-out. So instead the devs are beginning to install Linux VMs to run Docker from, or looking at podman.
People forget that just because there's a "rational" decision, doesn't mean people (or businesses) will choose it. Businesses are run by humans, and humans are irrational and dumb. Path of least resistance wins.
The pricing model for this is really stupid. A $21/mo subscription is a pain in the ass — they would be better off just selling it perpetual for $1000.
I ran a big enterprise shop for years. Nuisance licensing like this costs a fortune - I’d need to go do legal review, have it tracked for renewals and compliance, etc. Freemium product like this is always coupled with a stupid license enforcement audit that appears and tries to extort you. For a small quantity, overhead may be more than the product.
As an enterprise consumer, it makes me question the viability of the company. $250 a year is priced to allow unit managers to use P-Cards to avoid procurement processes. It’s too cheap to make meaningful amounts of money, so unless it’s a way to shift me to a more intelligent model, I’d have folks assigned to investigate alternatives.
Rule of thumb TCO for headcount is 1.5-2x salary to account for taxes, Medicare, health insurance, equipment cost, licenses, office square footage, stock options, travel, etc.
So a $250k asset from a business perspective is typically someone that makes $125k-$165k.
Salary + Taxes (Payroll, etc) + Fringe (Healthcare, etc) + Dev licenses + Training/conferences = paycheck * (n > 1.5)
I see $160K salary ceilings for general "senior engineers" for vast majority of non-FAANG companies in high COL East Coast city, so I'd imagine midwest is $25K less since housing is so much cheaper.
But maybe salaries are really exploding, and I just haven't been paying attention.
If docker and containerization is not yet widely used in the company, a lot of decisionmakers will not buy it, because they did fine without it for decades ;)
VCs are shooting themselves in the foot here: it is very obvious that we should never adopt any technical tool backed by VC, because they will eventually try to make us an offer we can't refuse and then go out of business shortly thereafter when their extortion attempt doesn't work.
Lol yes, I know. My point was the cost of meatware is 3 orders of magnitude greater than the software, and likely less at scale.
$100k/mo would mean 5,000 devs. I highly doubt a company with overheads near/in excess of a billion dollars/year is going to sweat a $1m expense for core infra like Docker.
However, this will have a massive change on the competitive landscape. For companies that haven't yet adopted Docker, this is a huge red checkmark. This change is going to spur development on open source alternatives like nothing else could.
This is such a good problem to have. I would love to cut Docker Inc. a check.
And we've basically moved over to garden (a k8s dev env) anyway. But we still use docker plenty.
Still should be doable for most businesses that size but licensing costs can blow up when you start to have a lot of seats. An annoying thing about the company I work for is that they have a limited number of licenses for things like IDEs, so they ration them. And so I'll boot up an IDE for a language I work in less - like say, PyCharm - and it will stop working because my license got taken away and given to someone else. I'll have to request another one be given back to get working again, which is pretty annoying when I'm trying to get something done. I work mostly with Docker / Kubernetes so if I'm in a situation where my core tools are being constantly taken away, I'll be pretty miffed.
I agree that Docker has every right to charge big companies for this software. Just wanted to point out that the costs can be more than you'd expect.
My company was already somewhat interested in checking out hosted IDEs, and today this pushed us to start some proof of concepts to move some teams over to github's codespaces.
So, yes, businesses will adjust their workflows to avoid the cost since many were already interested in improving their workflows and relieving some of the burden on their developer environment tooling teams.
YES! I've seen it. Stinginess at my shop regularly causes hours and hours of pricey engineering resources to address problems caused by underallocating cloud resources to the point things fail - or refusal to allow some cloud service because it will cost $100/month (despite saving 10s of thousands in eng resources)
It's crazy but I bet it happens many places.
Management may want some badge of honor for saving a budget line item. Or developers may want to embark on a new and interesting project and successfully convince management it's a good idea, who will agree for a wide range of reasons (not pissing off developers might be one of them).
Both will ignore the risk and considerable downsides. Happens all the time.
I have, and let me tell you, they will spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars to fight a purchase of $21. I'm really not joking.
Hahahahaha, yes, absolutely. Because if the wrong VP gets this in his head, it's not $250/year, it's "almost half a million dollars over 3 years" for the 500 employees or whatever. I've seen it happen.
This was email provided and owned by the very company I worked for, and it was costing enough for management to care.
Maybe enterprises have changed since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff like this does start asking questions as it’s a new cost on a budget.
But maybe my company is too large; large enough companies can have smaller teams, other teams will probably go the licensing route
1) Internship at a well known tech corporation. I was on a project that would accelerate the debugging and diagnostic of a machine the whole factory depended on; tl;dr I was making an app to replace an overgrown Excel sheet. To do that we used an opensource library but the catch was that the maintainer made its money by placing the documentation under a paywall. At some point the project was going well but the leftovers from Google Code could not do anymore. So it took two months (TWO MONTHS!) to do a $15 USD one time payment with the company's credit card. Apparently the process took longer due to the fact we had to go through PayPal.
2) Another multi billion corporation, less big but still multinational. They spent hours and lots of money on internal propaganda to promote their "core values"; which of course included "agility". We wanted to buy a commercial code analysis tool to save time during code reviews and increase code quality of a code base where ~30 devs worked. No brainier right? We had the R&D department's VP's OK to buy the damn thing and ask for forgiveness to the mother ship later. After 6 months our team leader was still receiving calls and and form to fill. "Do you really need this? Did you think about other products? Did you have the OK from this person thousand of miles away and this other person who speaks in a very broken English?" Using the company's internal organism and salary tables we estimated that during those six months they have wasted about 5 years of licensing in salary.
fuck..i need to find a new job
If you know more than other people, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you can't do that or don't want to, that's fine, but then please don't post.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It’s ok. Just keep telling yourself you’re smarter than everyone else.
Would love to know how you arrived at this number.
The list price for 100 engineers on the most expensive plan would be $25k/year and I guarantee Docker will do volume discounts.
Additionally, the terms just say you need a paid plan, which presumably could be the cheapo $5/mo plan which would be $6k/year for 100 engineers.