And when GitHub starts similar shenanigans, move out to where? I am old enough to know the we can't trust BigTech and their unpredictable behaviors.
Eventually we need to start a Codeberg like alternative using Prototype funds to be self reliant.
I mean why should you expect someone to host gigabytes of docker images for you, for free?
So now they destroy their foundations and learn whether they 10x or fold. Pretty standard VC playbook so I assume that's the driving force here.
What a load of crap. Free Software's "0th freedom" is the ability to use the program for whatever purpose you wish. The definition of Open Source is even looser than that. They are asking their "Open Source" users to make their software non-free, by restricting its use cases.
Anyway, the writing has been on the wall for a long while. If you haven't moved off Docker Hub yet, now is the time.
I have been building this for 5+ years, and offer a community edition for free while the hosted version is paid. Once the community edition starts costing money there will be even less reason to continue supporting it, it already causes a lot of extra work and problems that I'm otherwise uncompensated for.
This is exactly the reasoning Docker is using, so it seems reasonable?
OTOH, somewhere else in this context it was mentioned that curl is almost entirely maintained by one guy who makes money from consulting; and because of that, he wouldn't qualify.
So if you're either small enough to be a side hobby project, or large enough to have your own non-profit, you can get it for free; anywhere in between and you have to pay.
Personally I'd be happy for Xen to pay for Gitlab Ultimate, except that the price model doesn't really match an open-source project: we can't tell exactly how many people are going to show up and contribute, so how can we pay per-user?
If you view all of this "free" VC subsidized stuff as temporary/ephemeral you can still have a healthy relationship with it.
Hosting GB images in an append-only registry, some of which get published weekly or even daily, will burn an incredible amount of money in storage costs. And that’s before talking about ingress and egress.
There will also be a tonne of engineering costs for managing it, especially if you want to explore compression to push down storage costs. A lot of image layers share a lot of files, if you can store the decompressed tarballs in a chunk store with clever chunking you can probably reduce storage costs by an order of magnitude.
But, at the end of the day, expect costs for this to shoot into the 6-7 digit USD range per month in storage and bandwidth as a lower bound for your community hosted image registry.
c'mon. This is not amateur hour. Hosting the whole thing only made sense for docker because their plan was always to do this microsoft style play.
If you assume you are either open source or fully closed enterprises, the problem is very, very easy to solve. and cheap. Just relinquish full control of being able to close all the doors for a fee, like they are doing now.
1) deterministic builds with centralized caches
2) snapshots
Docker has some features of (1) but is really (2).
You absolutely do not want to download the recipe to build a Docker image instead of the image itself.
Further, the base images have no recipe. They are a tarball of a slimmed down pristine base os install.
Tricky bit is, for some users, you’ll either abandon them with no way to share or you will still be paying their ingress/egress fees when their client falls back to your TURN server if NAT hole punching fails.
You’ll also have to solve image expiration gracefully. Hosting a “publish as much as you want” append-only ledger isn’t going to scale infinitely. There needs to be garbage collection, rate limiting, fair-use policies, moderation, etc. Otherwise you’re still going to outstrip your storage pool.
One of the most revolutionary and fundamental tools to be made is a basic way / template / paradigm which constructs databases in a replicable way, such that the hash of the code is mapped to the hash of the data. Then the user could either just download the data or reproduce it locally, depending on their system's capabilities, and automatically become a host for that data in the network.
big projects could self host easily, as their popularity would quickly give them enough seeds to not need to provide much traffic themselves.
also I think adapting docker way of storing layers as tars is fundamentally broken, maybe with combination with something like ostree as a storage to decrease duplicates we could really cut a lot of storage.
imagine how much unique content does your average docker image have? 1 binary and maybe few text files? rest is probably os and deps anyways.
All this centralised dependence talk is frustrating (it's expensive, no free lunch etc;) when it's largely been a solved problem for decades.
The problem with just replacing GitHub isn't the source code hosting part. There's tons of alternatives both commercial and open source. The problem is the cost of CI infrastructure and CDN/content/release hosting.
Even moderating said CI infrastructure is a nightmare. freedesktop.org which uses a self-hosted gitlab instance recently had to shutdown CI for everything but official projects because the crypto mining bots attacked over the last few days hard and fast.
Even core-js sole maintainer failed to raise enough donations to feed his own family, despite the library is used by at least half of the top 1000 Alexa websites. [0]
People (and also big-techs) just won't pay for anything they can get for free.
[0]: https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02...
The difference between GitHub and Docker is that GitHub is profitable.