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Comment by sealeck | Hacker News Reader

This is really a question of framing. The other way you can look at it is: Docker has benefitted from a community adopting its products, and developing software that makes Docker more useful. As someone who sells Docker services, you benefit from a greater market size.

It's like how WordPress have benefitted from people authoring plugins – even though wordpress.org has hosted them for "free", this has been good commercial sense as it allows them to sell more WordPress.com to people.

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> It's like how WordPress have benefitted from people authoring plugins – even though wordpress.org has hosted them for "free", this has been good commercial sense as it allows them to sell more WordPress.com to people.

With seemingly similar rent-seeking behaviour when Automattic decide they’ve had enough and want to put a toll on that road…

With your framing this looks like the free/“free” initial use of such a framing is similar to free accounts on new social media platforms. In that case the motivation is super clear: grow the social platform since a social platform with few users is useless. Then when they get big enough they start charging. Once you’re already locked in via all sorts of connections.

Again in the case of social platforms: for the longest time this was framed as user entitlement if anyone didn’t like it. Which failed to see the other side. Yes, the users wanted something free but the company also got something back from the user.

We could go back and forth on details like the service growing to such a point that the free service becomes too much of a burden on them. But consider the case when the free service was treated by the business as an investment for $X which was supposed to carry that cost until the proverbial rug could be pulled from the users without a mass exodus—grow your user base until you have enough of a mass to demand a considerable escape velocity in order to be avoided.

Again, arguments could be made either way. But it is definitely not as simple-cut as an altruistic service versus selfish users/consumers.

I’m sure someone versed in Economics could summarize the above in a phrase or a sentence.

And once those services are fully developed, and the market is captured, do they still need to provide free services?

Isn't compatibility issues a major problem for alternative registries?

> Isn't compatibility issues a major problem for alternative registries?

Er, is it? I've used a handful of different registries and never hit anything that even resembled a compatibility problem. Have I just been lucky?

One example that springs to mind is Homebrew/MacPorts. I think they install things differently and might not be interoperable?

They do things differently, but what does that have to do with docker registries?

It’s an example of incompatibility in registries generally, which I thought was the nature of your surprise at its existence or occurrence. I’m not aware of any such incompatibilities among Docker registries, but other issues may affect usage such as rate limits. I’m not sure what the person you were responding to had in mind.

I had waaay too much problem with pushing to GCR, when pushing to a self-hosted GitLab's registry worked.

"Docker has benefitted from a community adopting its products,"

It takes a whole lot of mental gymnastics to argue that a provider of free services is actually the one benefitting from that interaction, and not the other way around.

Go ahead and build your systems on free dependencies like WordPress and Debian, but just get real and don't pretend that you are better than professionals that build business relationships and actually pay for their software dependencies like RHEL and Webflow.

I mean, paying for your software dependencies doesn’t automatically make things any better.

It's wild that "people should pay for software" is a controversial statement amongst software developers.

If software developer, don't pay for the software you rely on. Then non technical users who appreciate software even less would pay for software with much less frequency and for much lower prices when they do!

It is us as developers that need to first institutionalize the idea that software is paid, otherwise we have little hope to get paid for our efforts.

There is difference between paying for software and paying for the development of software, you know.

Yeah sure, but there's trickle down effects. What incentive would an employer have to hire you to build software, if they can't then go and sell the software that you built for profit.

My employer themself uses the software I write for them plus they provide access to its functionality as a service. This model have been bringing in enough profit for the last 10 years, apparently, to justify the steady expansion of the number of programmers employed.

Ah yes, the phenomenon I was describing does apply more strongly to consumer software. But it also does apply to B2B software to a lesser degree.

In effect the fact that your business model relies on charging for bespoke software, proves that you make no money on software that can be reused for more than one client! Which is actually where most of the efficiency of software comes.

Even if you want your software to be used by the public, it still doesn't need to be turned into a product, there are other schemes of financing it. You can, for instance, write it off as R&D (which is what programming actually is) or whatever category is assigned to the "donating to Linux Foundation" line in the spending accounts of IBM/Oracle/MS/etc.

Docker was in serious financial trouble in 2019 after the community had been benefiting from it's products for years by that point.

Would you say Github benefit from open source developers using it? (And if not, why do you think they provide the service?)

These people are maintaining free Docker images for Docker users to use. They're not charging for this, and Docker benefit massively from these images being available!

"Would you say Github benefit from open source developers using it? (And if not, why do you think they provide the service?)"

Let's assume it's an equitable exchange.

"These people are maintaining free Docker images for Docker users to use. They're not charging for this, and Docker benefit massively from these images being available!"

Getting into nuance here, I do see the benefit a corp has over hosting source code, training data, reputation, so we see eye to eye there. But I don't see much benefit of hosting container images. Add that to the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude more expensive than hosting code!

What value is there in being a provider of free hosting that is commesurate with being a host of source code?

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