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> requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times

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.

What would have happened if Microsoft had put some clause in volume licenses that said "you can use a system unlicensed for up to 30 days before paying for a license".

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.

that trick might work once or twice, until a hard policy comes into effect after the company gets burned.

People do that with EAs. Once they figure out that it’s happening, they have various means to detect it.

For non-prod/qa/testing/dev stuff Microsoft provides MSDN/Visual Studio Subscriptions which provide specially licensed versions of their operating systems and software. Everyone who uses the MSDN software must have their own subscription and it can’t be used by real users/customers except in a limited dev/test capacity (e.g. UAT).

I’ve had this very conversation with work colleagues. We can go through the inordinate-pain of acquiring a licence, and all that entails, or we can choose open-source solution and be making progress by the end of the day.

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.”

One other big factor: certain other vendors have very aggressive sales tactics which essentially boil down to “buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need or we’ll audit every computer in your company and charge a penalty for anything we can find to quibble with”.

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.

Yup, this is the concern. Having been kindly asked by Oracle to remove virtualbox extensions, this sort of gotcha/conditional pricing feels dangerous

The big thing for me is the question of the future: they say they currently won't be predatory about it[1] and I have no reason to doubt that the people saying that are being completely honest, but we don't know who will be working there in the future or where the next acquisition/merger will take them.

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...

Docker is a company that won’t exist in a few years, so a promise of leniency now means nothing.

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.

My personal guess was that they get eaten by Microsoft and Docker will be integrated more deeply with VS (Code) and GitHub.

Some years back I tried to pay the $50 for the VBox extensions - small company and I was the only user. They were very confused, almost like they couldn’t understand that I really wanted to pay for something that I judged good value for the money.

They ended up telling me to forget about it.

I guess that perhaps they only want to target large businesses.

How Oracle discovered you're using it?

Our company has a lot of processes that could be streamlined via containerization of build and development environments, across Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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.

Someone making $250k/year shouldn't think twice dropping $21/month on a tool that truly makes them more productive.

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.

Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that shouldn't be followed. Because it hides the true cost of a project, which may result in poor decisions later on. Because the cost of a decision/process should fall on the person or company who has the ability to change it. Because using wages to pay for business expenses wasn't part of the employment agreement. Any one of these would suffice.

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.

The problem is that there's simply no easy fix for these bureaucratic frictions and sub-optimal equilibriums. It's the nature of large organizations--they trade efficiencies in some areas for inefficiencies in others.

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.

Unfortunately your policy, in a small way, perpetuates this ‘sub-optimal’ efficiency by obscuring the true cost of your work from your employer.

You’re making life harder for everyone else!

> Because it establishes an exploitative precedent that shouldn't be followed.

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.

Except that's not the issue being discussed here. Expecting to pay for software development isn't a bad thing. Expecting the employee to pay out of pocket for business expenses is the exploitative behavior.

A couple comments earlier people were talking about where does this stop, 1000$ a month? A 3D CAD license with the ability to do FEA is around 30 grand a year, I’ve seen seats of specialized software cost north of 100k a year per seat, and that’s for people that 100k is probably pretty close to their take home.

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.

It's not about $x a month, it's about the friction of dropping any money at all. It could be 10c/year and still annoy everyone, because now they have to go through a procurement process, find someone with a company credit card, wrangle with reimbursement forms, etc.

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.

This 1000x developers are lazy and generally don't want go throug bureaucratic hassle. Long run this just going to hurt docker when developers start using podman or some other free alternative.

As someone who went from the PA suburbs and small IT shops (where 75k was a premium salary) to the SF startup scene and Facebook, one of the observations that has stuck with me was the incredible cheapness of my wealthy tech peers. It's hard to explain unless you've been around people who do a whole lot more with a whole lot less.

I noticed this exact same thing in my ex-FAANG colleagues. No judgment, just an observation.

Maybe they’re wealthy because they aren’t spending all their money on shit their employer should buy. You say cheap, others say “good with money”.

For companies it's not that easy though. Employees will accumulate services and don't cancel them, will leave without leaving any info on which services were bought for what purposes etc. Companies still need proper invoices and account for all charges. If they cannot accomplish this because employees forgot they bought services or have left without letting anyone know, the company is on the hook for it.

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.

So ignoring holidays, $250k/yr works out to $120/hr.

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.

> 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

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...

Fixing this has to be a great business opportunity. Surely someone is already working on it?

A simple local k8s installation with a simple but effective GUI on top, running containerd instead of docker and with a CLI wrapper for docker commands, would be more than enough for everything I need.

My team is working on https://rancherdesktop.io/ and it's scary how closely matches we're doing (depending on what you consider to be effective UI)…

Yeah, but who's going to pay for that development? Especially since the targets are Windows and MacOS.

20 is an extremely low estimate. It is more like the greater of N solutions for N teams, and M solutions for M people.

It's almost as if a manager or engineer shouldn't manage the overall finances of a company or department... Gee, I wonder if there's a job title or something like that that could manage finances like this?

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.