Docker no longer sunsetting Free Teams

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35295807

I wonder if in cases like this, it even makes sense to reverse a decision. The damage has been done, so why bother?

Me, personally, Whenever in the future a dependency on the Docker team comes up, I'll make sure we double check if they are really needed in our stack.

Not much to add, just yet another corporate blunder for the history books. Reputational damage has been done, folks have left, and they won't get them back, IMO.

So insane, what were they thinking? They should write a case about this for Harvard Business School: how to take your struggling brand and, in one fell swoop, destroy any and all goodwill with your users and accelerate the (probably inevitable) decline of your company.

The brand damage is done. Rolling back doesn't change that; they are still the company that would do this and then leave everyone freaking out for a week straight before doing a total 180.

Somebody has their shit together, but it ain't Docker Inc.

We should all thank Docker for accelerating the transition to podman (et al.) and ghcr.io.

> After listening to feedback and consulting our community, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision in sunsetting our Free Team plan

You caught us trying to be jerks, so we wont be jerks the next months, maybe an year. You will forget soon.

Wow, a complete rowback. Interesting they'll even be giving refunds.

The thing I was going to miss most was just the ability to "brand" the images.

mysillyusername/mything vs mything/mything has a very different feel.

I wonder if they could get the best of both worlds if they offered a "DNS" version where when you pull from hub.docker.com it's actually just proxying from you hosting the image somewhere else.

If someone from Mirantis behind this decision reads this discussion, can you also revert the forced useless login in OpenLens ? https://github.com/lensapp/lens/issues/5444

Thanks.

Cool for people who depended on it. I will probably never use Docker Inc. products again.

Good, this plan was corporate stupidity. "let's alienate the community that is the very basis of the success of our company". Madness. They should do the exact opposite and ensure the world relies on their infrastructure rather than finding creative ways to cut all their dependencies on any Docker provided technology. Which is of course what a lot of people have been doing in the last few years. The whole rename of docker to moby and walking that back. All the antics around Docker for desktop. The whole mess with docker swarm. And now this. It's stupid.

The faster people walk away from Docker provided stuff, the less relevant Docker as a company becomes. In light of that, telling most of your users to please bugger off is an epic level of stupidity. A classic throwing away the baby with the bathwater situation. Docker needs to take a very critical look at its leadership and what just happened. Any of the yes-men that thought this was a great idea, should probably be nudged out of the door. Fix that and promote the people that intervened and rolled this decision back.

Yes, keeping infrastructure for a low value commodity like docker hub costs money. But it creates opportunities to make money via more valuable add on services. Which is a lot easier when people recognize you as the world's leading authority on anything docker related. Docker's main issue is that it has not been very good at doing that. A good start would be acknowledging the things that are actually valuable assets. Like having world + dog relying on docker hub for distributing software and developers installing their software on laptops because it is so good. You don't throw that away. That's not a problem that needs solving.

They should look at how Microsoft manages Github. Many people and companies use that for free. That's a feature not a bug. Github actually used to charge for private repositories. And then they changed their mind and gave people unlimited access to free private repositories. That move ensured that it solidified itself as the undisputed #1 choice for people and companies to host their software.

And of course many corporate users end up converting to becoming paying customers because Github has plenty of non free features that are worth paying for. But hosting the entirety (well close to it) of essentially all OSS projects on this planet and a community of users that is essentially anyone active professionally as a developer means that all of their potential future customers already have free accounts. That must be really convenient for their sales team. All they need to do is figure out what users and companies do, where they struggle, what they need, etc. And then pitch solutions to those issues.

Genius. Github is a highly successful business. MS bought them for that reason. Maybe they can buy Docker too. It would be a great fit for them.