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Comment by Aleklart | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get the hate of Docker as a company. Yes, this is crap technology that incentivise resource inefficiency at its peak form, but this is how stacks like ruby or python are at least working. Still, docker org invented all the tools, gave them for free, promote, document and support them, gave free global registry that can be filled by anyone and contains petabytes of trash, with free thousands of terabytes of egress monthly. They gave away all their intellectual work to RedHat/bazaar and participate in development of “open standards” for free. And now when they take away some expensive toy, developers became hostile and call them unreliable.

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i love Docker, but i think people by and large forget that OCI images are a thing, and that ultimately we are talking about slightly complex tarballs here.

i do think Docker is squandering an insanely privileged position here, even if i'm not particularly invested/dogmatic personally about Docker as a brand. only every so often does a company become a member of the popular lexicon -- an Uber instead of a Taxi, a Kleenex instead of a tissue -- we pull Docker images every day even though they are actually OCI images, or hosted on GitHub.

this privilege is insanely huge and it is one granted through technical aptitude, intense problem solving, commitment to open source and tooling, and so on, that the Docker project displayed for its first two decades or so of existence.

where it fell off that wagon as a brand, and misaligned with its technology, i don't know. this is just one person's 2c.

This is my reason why I hate them: https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/ and specifically this: https://lwn.net/Articles/676938/

All the discussions from the Docker team regarding SystemD feel like they want to push Docker Swarm and see SystemD as a threat to their business model. It would not supprise me if they downtalk Lennart Poetterin on a personal level.

Also to this day if we want to setup complex test scenarios we need the --privileged flag to run Docker in Docker.

i think the hate comes from them squandering a position of their magnitude, built upon the investment and trust of the open source ecosystem.

github set a precedent with free public repos, but they traded the cost of supporting that for being the canonical way to store source code online (or as close to it as one company can get).

docker accesses this privilege but then demands that open source people, who are by definition not paid for their work directly, must pay to host images on their branded platform, the one which guarantees them a place in the technology hall of fame.

the double-punch of that failed remunerative trade ends up feeling to that community like a betrayal; not to mention the self-defeating strategy it embodies, since a technical solution here is not only possible, but would be expected from a company granted that position and privilege in the software supply chain (technical aptitude / excellence).

at worst it is a betrayal, at best it comes across as lazy, because they are not reaching for a technical solution which can satisfy every constraint; they are satisfied launching one that merely satisfies their own needs, to the detriment of the community that supported them.

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