Building software is also the thing that pays a lot of our bills. We expect our customers to pay us for our engineering labor. What makes Docker any different?
I've also found that a lot of large enterprises have had big difficulties on hammering out licensing terms with Docker. When it's a product you actively use, that means the devs will either wait for shit to hit the fan or start looking at alternatives, and find that there are still free competitors (Rancher Desktop, Podman, Minikube depending on your use-case).
IMO, it would have been a whole lot better if the Desktop product had been paid to begin with, rather than being suddenly switched as a last minute monetization strategy.
Would you rather they go under as a company, due to how badly their attempts at monetizing containers have failed in the past and then have Docker Desktop not be maintained at all and have Docker as a whole take a noticeable hit?
> ...and a non negligible cost.
I'd say that perhaps using either Docker with the CLI, IDE integrations/plugins or using Rancher Desktop (https://rancherdesktop.io/) are more cost effective alternatives in that case.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200101044220/https://www.docke...
If they made it explicit that it is free forever, then I would agree with your stance that Docker in the wrong. But so far I couldn't find a shred of information indicating that Docker commercial/enterprise account will be free forever. So that didn't put Docker in a wrong.
And be realistic of this world, you cannot expect software companies to survive on free account alone forever. Who is paying the servers to keep it up? Docker. Who is providing the support? Docker. Who paying the developers to keep Docker products updated and introduce new features? Docker. How could Docker survive without the cash flow with the free account forever. I mean Google, Microsoft, Chococately, Homebrew/Brew, etc have commercial licenses to cover the cost of their products to keep it free for personal-use users. If you don't see this coming, well I don't what to tell you but that is the cost of doing business.
Well sorry but free without any conditions attached, becomes free as in beer. If I give you a shiny toy for free no strings attached, I can't come back to your house later and ask for money for it because I didn't specify how long it would be free. If I didn't specify the conditions of the 'free', then I goofed up.
If they didn't put any conditions on the duration of the 'free' from the start and is causing them to loose money, then either they were financially stupid from the start or, more likely, they wanted to pull the classic SV success scam where you bait customers into a free* product for years, burning endless cash to capture the market, and when customers become locked in thanks to the 'free', and you are the de-facto standard with no competition left, start rent seeking.
And people complaining about the "bait-and-switch" that occurred few years ago while Docker has been charging for non-free licenses way before that. Huh?
You can provide something for free, not make any promises that it will be free with upgrades in perpetuity, and one day decide to stop. It’s as simple as that.
Says who? There's plenty of free as in didn't transact dollars for software that I have extremely high expectations for. Visual Studio Code, Gmail, Github, etc.
When they one day decide to stop I can also choose to be disappointed, not buy and no longer use their software. It's as simple as that.
The first objective of a pre-revenue company is to grow as fast as possible and then either get acquired or start generating revenue, which almost always involves marking up their product. And because of the nature of software, it's easy to build POC's and prototypes that half-work today, with the promise of better functionality and integration in the future. But that tomorrow always comes with a cost.
Somehow, folks in this industry seem to be convinced that it's OK for them to turn a profit on their value-add software, but not other people. What are software companies supposed to do? Overcharge today for software that doesn't necessarily work right now? What's the model that companies like Docker should use instead?
You're mistaken here. Nobody has issues paying for software, however people have issues with being baited into a free product to then suddenly be charged after companies get locked in, which is a shitty business practice that needs to be discouraged.
Had Docker been transparent from the start that at some point in the future it will cost money, then that would have been fair since this would have been factored into business decisions.
You can't just hand out free candy and after people swallow it, you tell them they now have to pay up or throw it up, since you can't expect such good candy to be free. That's basically a scam.
Again, it's not about the money, it's about transparency.
Docker never said the product would be free forever. You'd have an argument if they initially committed to keeping Docker Desktop free forever and reneged, but they didn't. It's kind of silly to expect a company to communicate in such vague terms. What company comes out with a statement saying "we're not sure when or what the details are, but someday, we're gonna start charging for Docker Desktop". Also, how does this work when a company decides to pivot? Maybe they initially intended never to charge for DD but their initial business strategy didn't work and they had to pivot. Is it wrong for a business to modify it's revenue streams?
If you choose to incorporate a a piece of technology developed by a private company into your commercial project that is free today, you should expect to pay for it at some point in the future.
I can see why people aren't happy with how things have played out. Docker does need to earn its crust and pay its people, and this is strictly for the desktop UI, team space, and nascent collaboration feature with dev environments. It's a value-add over barebones docker but, and this is what is probably frustrating, it targets Windows and Mac users exclusively because it's not as easy to run docker without their software.
Let's not also forget that they made optional upgrades a paid-for feature, while at the same time releasing software with showstopping bugs and regressions. Their response was literally to pay them money so you could deny an automatic upgrade. So my sympathy for Docker finding itself in this position is fairly limited, knowing that.
The solution is to add additional features and charge for them; they should have charged more for e.g. automatic kubernetes configurations and other more "businessey" features, but now it's too late and there's no value-adds that they haven't already added.
In the end, it's not a complaint about Docker's "value-add" software; they're complaining about an increase in the price without an increase in the value.
I'm not sure what Docker could do from this point on. Maybe I'm missing something, but they seem pretty doomed overall.
Now I have to use your software because you used investor money to make that software industry standard (standard, which is in fact pretty low). Yet you still made no money.
Who knows, maybe if Docker didn’t exist the vacuum in the solution space would be filled with something better or worse?
The initial setup is slightly easier, but then you're exposed to random modal dialog popups for all time moving forward.
If there was some value add, then maybe it would be worth paying for. As it is, it looks like they spun off the part of the company that had any hope of turning a profit (via support contracts), and now they're flailing around in search of a business model.
It's a shame. Dockerfiles are nice. I hope they come up with a way of getting people to pay for some (actual) value add.
I know there are better alternatives but it seems like there are a handful of alternatives right now and no clear preferred alternative.