Elixir: Docker now charges open source orgs $300 | Hacker News Reader

Elixir: Docker now charges open source orgs $300

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I was not expecting this to make Hacker News, so before I come out as being entitled (hey, perhaps I am!), I think it is worth adding some context now that I have more characters.

First of all: yes, I agree, it is completely fine if Docker wants to charge for this. As it is completely fine for me to be frustrated with the unclear communication around this (there is a HN discussion on it [1]).

The biggest issue is: I actually won't be affected by this. I don't use images from Docker Hub, the community does. Any large open source community has likely asked, at some point, for Docker Images and they are the ones to be affected. And in a month (or not, the messaging has been unclear), they may find their deployments pipelines broken. Any company that depends on Docker Hub images should be triple checking their Dockerfiles right now because they may need to update them within a month.

Others have mentioned Docker for open source projects [2], but the terms are, honestly, very disappointing. If you have any prospect of making any money, regardless of the amount, then you are automatically rejected. And most open source projects take several years (if ever) to become profitable (for Elixir, that took about 6-7 years).

Again, they don't have to provide an open source grant, but I also don't have to pretend the grant will be useful to most. I can (thankfully) afford the yearly fee but I am drawing a line at paying for distributing the software I write for free (and another line on the extremely limited open source grant application).

Have a good one. :)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154025 [2]: https://www.docker.com/community/open-source/application/

Definitely an argument for URL based registries/imports. This is bad, has Docker responded to any of this yet?

Thanks for Elixir buddy.

I don't understand why there's so much backlash on this.

Let's be honest here.

Docker has been directly involved with creating a container runtime and has provided this for free with no strings attached for about 10 years. They've also hosted Docker images on the Docker Hub for free this whole time. Using Docker's runtime and official images are still free for everyone after this change.

Now they are removing some of the free bits for hosting repos for teams but at the same time they offer a form you can fill out to continue to get free hosting for open source projects https://www.docker.com/community/open-source/application/. Why didn't Jose fill out this form?

We've all benefited from Docker and in my opinion their pricing strategy is pretty reasonable around team licenses. I mean you could be a $500 million dollar company with 100 developers and end up paying about $10,000 for the year on Docker Desktop licenses, meanwhile your payroll on those devs will be like $20,000,000.

My read of what José has said here is that the terms attached to that form rule out most open source projects using it because one of the clauses on being eligible is that "your organization must not seek to make a profit through services or by charging for higher tiers". This rules out basically any project where one or more contributors have made any money from consulting, which is ~all major open source projects.

> This rules out basically any project where one or more contributors have made any money from consulting, which is ~all major open source projects.

You're right, he's built a multi-employee consulting agency around Elixir which he has linked in his Twitter bio. He even explicitly calls out at using Docker to install Livebook on its official installation page.

So he's built a profitable business on top of Elixir and is now upset for having to pay $300 to continue using the tools that help him run his business? I don't get it. This is the cost of running a business. He could choose to self host the Docker bits but I'm guessing the costs would be higher than paying Docker's monthly fee. Alternatively he can spend the next XX years developing his own competitor to Docker and then pay out of pocket to host everyone's stuff for free indefinitely.

I have replied at the root but I think you are misunderstanding my complaints.

I completely agree that Docker doesn't own me anything. By the same token, I can express my frustration by them vaguely announcing that many Livebook and Elixir deployment pipelines may be broken _within a month_.

Also, it took several years of _free work_ for Elixir to become profitable (and even then, we invest most of the profits right back into the community). And I consider well within my rights to recognize that their open source grant wouldn't have helped me back then and I doubt it will help others now.

Overall, it is not about the cost. It is just that I would rather take my business elsewhere (paid or free).

Here is a quick exercise: imagine I announce the next Elixir versions will require at least $300/year to use. I bet everyone would be fine with it. The cost of running a business and all that, right?

> Here is a quick exercise: imagine I announce the next Elixir versions will require at least $300/year to use. I bet everyone would be fine with it. The cost of running a business and all that, right?

That's not a fair analogy.

Docker is still free to use to build your own things today. You can run containers on your servers and pay $0. You can host images on your own registry and Docker makes $0 off that, you can still provide free value to the community by allowing the community to pull from your registry at no cost.

An accurate analogy would be more like Elixir officially hosting all open source Elixir apps for free for ~10 years and now 10 years later you want to start charging a relatively small amount of money to continue hosting things for the community. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me and that's what Docker is doing here.

The analogy worked fine under the last sentence of your previous comment - now removed - which said something like "assume nothing is given, assume nothing is owned".

Anyway, we can work with your example. Your example is missing the context that Docker images are not always used as an app, but also as a building block.

So let's change the exercise slightly: assume Dashbit owns Hex.pm and posting any package to Hex.pm now requires $300/year or packages will be removed within a month.

As an OSS maintainer, if you do not pay, you will break the deployment of all users of your package. So... would everyone still be fine with it? The cost of running a business and all that?

EDIT: Hex.pm supports custom registries which anyone can self-host. Including built-in tools to help you with that. You can apply this exercise to any open source community with a centralized-by-default package manager with custom registries (which, afaik, are most of them).

To me that says Red Hat doesn't qualify. Since the Organization attempts to make a profit. Apache does since they are a non profit.

However it says nothing about individuals of the organization making money off consulting. So contributing to Apache and running an Apache consulting company is OK, Apache still qualifies but your consulting company doesn't.

At the very least the rules around this need to be clarified, I can understand them not wanting to host pseudo open source "open core" or interfaces to proprietary SaaS for free. If that includes any service though (like their own hosting, or as you say, consulting), it seems somewhat ridiculous.

> I don't understand why there's so much backlash on this.

Because of bait and switch tactics.

1. Because they've privileged Docker Hub throughout all Docker tooling everywhere, and encouraged everybody to treat it as the central community hub of images. It's not just any registry: it's the core registry for the entire ecosystem, and they've very actively worked to ensure that state (rejecting all requests to make the default configurable, or to deprecate implicit registry references, etc).

2. Because the open-source application form excludes the vast majority of open-source projects. E.g. Curl isn't eligible because the founder additionally offers paid support. I imagine Elixir won't be either as the founder profits from it by running an Elixir consultancy (https://dashbit.co/). Docker Inc itself is marketed as an open-source project, but clearly wouldn't be eligible either. There's no revenue limits, no flexibility, just 'no plan towards >$0 revenue ever'. This is not most people's definition of 'open source'.

3. Because although yes it is a lot of traffic, they're trying to charge the community orgs to host images, whilst simultaneously they already charging the end users to pull these images too! They tightened the rate limits in 2020 so that any serious download usage as a client already requires a paid account.

4. Because they've given only 30 days notice before they'll drop all the existing images, with no redirection or migration options at all - just "pay up or we delete everything".

5. Because this will break every existing reference to every deleted image everywhere, and there are _millions_ (because as above, they've encouraged everybody to treat Docker Hub as the core ecosystem registry), from blog posts/documentation/tutorials to CI jobs to deployment definitions, and this is going to be a massive bomb that hits the industry & huge numbers of developers (even their paying customers!) when it lands in 29 days.

If you're a substantial company with 100s of devs, sure, you should be paying for Docker. If you're a 3-person community project publishing open-source images to Docker Hub that these companies are using, making a tiddly income with commercial support, you should not (and in practice, you probably can't).

What's probably going to happen is GHCR becoming the main registry for everything, further strengthening GothUb place in the FOSS world.

I'm still unsure whether Docker saves companies money or not. Had spent 10 hours+ for each docker network issue at a company. Scripting is cumbersome but it's mostly write-once, easier to dev/debug/deploy etc.

Docker’s not obligated to host open source, but they sure worked hard to convince open source projects to jump on their free offerings in their earlier years.

I can definitely understand how it could be frustrating for project maintainers.

I’m more worried about the second order impacts here: what about all the container files that referenced these open source images? I imagine there are a lot more of those than those pushed to DockerHub.

My hope is the last versions are frozen in place and new versions require the updated accounts. It’s a gentle way to not break peoples setups and instead alter them to it needing to be updated.

In an ideal world every project had its own registry. Those centralized registries/package managers that are baked into tools are one of the reasons why hijacking namespaces (and typos of them) is even possible and so bad.

Externalizing hosting costs to other parties is very attractive but if you are truly open source you can tell everybody to build the packages themselves from source and provide a script (or in this case a large Dockerfile) for that. No hosting of binary images necessary for small projects.

Especially since a lot of open source projects are not used by other OSS but by large organizations I don't see the need to burden others with the costs for these businesses. Spinning this into "Docker hates Open Source" is absolutely missing the point.

Linux distributions figured out decades ago that universities are willing to help out with decentralized distribution of their binaries. Why shouldn't this work for other essential OSS as well?

That's one reason I like Go's model of "import is just an URL path"

Sure it has some problems but it's far preferable than to be slaved to single entity controlling repo

We need some sort of system that's both distributed (anyone can host) and centralized (one url for a download that doesn't require someone to keep a server up with an ssl certificate needing monthly renewal until the end of time).

We also need to set it up so that the default is that your server using the project also helps host the stuff it needs to run.

Glad I decided quite a while ago that Docker is a licensing mess I don’t want to touch with a ten feet pole.

It was always weird to me that we let the index and the source stay co-mingled for so long, as it just built up technical debt that is now coming due because docker's profitability isn't what it was expecting.

Charging for a hosting service is now being "actively hostile". Talk about entitlement.

It is, if you offer a free tier for some, to get momentum and passive advertising, and then push them off your platform.

I understand companies have to make money, but imagine if gmail started charging all of their users for email, while probably a billion of people has all their accounts tied to that address.

There was a lot of theories in the early days that this is what Google would do, as I recall. I'm actually sad they didn't. Imagine what the world would look like if gmail (and Facebook) had cost a dollar or three per month, though. The companies' incentives would be completely different, and we'd maybe have some actual competition in those spaces.

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