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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

> On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!

Was this a deal breaker for any company?

I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free.

If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license. So $90 / year for everyone, but if you have US developers your all-in payroll is probably going to be over $200,000 per developer or roughly $2 million dollars. In that context $90 is practically nothing. A single lunch for the dev team could cost almost double that.

To me that is a bargain, you're getting an officially supported tool that "just works" on all operating systems.

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Companies aren't monoliths, they're made of teams.

Big companies are made of teams of teams.

The little teams don't really get to make purchasing decisions.

If there's a free alternative, little teams just have to suck it up and try to make it work.

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Also consider that many of these expenses are born by the 'cost center' side of the house, that is, the people who don't make money for the company.

If you work in a cost center, the name of the game is saving money by cutting expenses.

If technology goes into the actual product, the cost for that is accounted for differently.

It always amazes me how hostile most large companies are to paying for developer tools that have a trivial cost. Then they will approve the budget for some yay quartly profit party no one cares about that cost $100k for the venue rental alone.

I do understand that this mostly is because management wants staff to be replaceable and disposable having specialty tools suggests that a person can be unique.

No, it's not because of that. It's because:

1. You want to control spend - there are budgets. 2. You want to control accounting - minimize the number of vendors you work with. Each billing needs to come with an invoice, these need to be managed, when a developer leaves you need to cancel their seat etc. It's a pain. 3. You want to control compliance - are these tools safe? Are they accessing sensitive data? Are they audited? 4. You want to control interoperability between teams. Can't have it become a zoo of bring-your-own stuff.

So free tools get around all of these, you can just wing it under the radar and if the tool becomes prominent enough then you go fight the war to have it adopted. Once there's spend, you need to get into line. And that line makes a lot of sense when you're into 30 developers, let alone hundreds.

If you've got 30 developers then you've probably got, what, five or six teams? Your tech leads/senior engineers/whoever provides tech leadership at a team level are operating at a scale where they can go to the pub with your head of engineering/CTO/each other/the dude from finance who has a credit card and fit around a table.

I've worked at companies that size and the "war" involved putting time in the calendar of the head of engineering, asking how his son was, demoing the product we wanted for about two minutes and explaining the pain point it solved, then promising to get our legal team and the one security person to review it after he put the credit card in and before we used it in prod. When I worked somewhere larger it was much more difficult.

Obviously all of this is far from universal. I've worked at places that just gave me a card with $500-$1000mo limit for whatever I need. I've worked at a place when I asked for $100 of hard drive space to test something out of production they said find another way.

The problem isn’t generally the cost, it’s the complexity.

You end up having to track who has it installed. Hired 5 more people this week? How many of them will want docker desktop? Oh, we’ve maxed the licenses we bought? Time to re-open the procurement process and amend the purchase order.

A large company who is buying licenses for tools has to deal with this for many different things. Docker is not unique here.

An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows and automated ways to keep tabs on who has what and who needs what. They may also be under various compliance requirements that expect due diligence to happen every quarter to make sure everything is legit from a licensing perspective.

Even if it's not automated, it's normal for a team to email IT / HR with new hire requirements. Having a list of tools that need licenses in that email is something I've seen at plenty of places.

I would say there's lots of other tools where onboarding is more complicated from a license perspective because it might depend on if a developer wants to use that tool and then keeping tabs on if they are still using it. At least with Docker Desktop it's safe to say if you're on macOS you're using it.

I guess I'm not on board with this being a major conflict point.

Idk what to tell you other than that it is.

Large companies do have ways to deal with this: they negotiate flat rates or true-up cadences with vendors. But now you’ve raised the bar way higher than “just use podman”.

Or just use Podman and don't worry about licenses, since it's just as good but sooo much easier.

Some day I hope to work for a company small enough that I can "just" use any software I feel like for whatever reasons I want.

But I have to feed my family.

> I can "just" use any software I feel like for whatever reasons I want.

What could possibly go wrong?

For my day job, installing software / admin access is reserved to those who work in IT / software development. Rest of the business need to go through a vetted software library.

You're arguing against a straw man here - no one but you used the term "dealbreaker" or "major" conflict point. It can be true that it is not a dealbreaker but still a downside.

Not sure on docker desktops specifics but usually large companies have enterprise/business licencing available and specifically do not deal with this, and do not want to manually deal with this, because they can use SSO & dynamically assign licenses to user groups etc.

Or use Microsoft MyAccess to have the users allocate a license themselves.

It becomes a pain point when the IT team never heard of docker, all new licenses need to be approved by the legal department, and your manager is afraid to ask for any extra budget.

Also, I don't want to have to troubleshoot why the docker daemon isn't running every time I need it

It becomes a pain point when the IT team never heard of docker

Or when your IT department is prohibited from purchasing anything that doesn't come from Microsoft or CDW.

>It becomes a pain point when the IT team never heard of docker

Where do you work ? Is that even possible in 2025?

Apparently they work in the past...

'corp IT' in a huge org typically all outsourced MCSEs who are seemingly ignorant of every piece of technology outside of azure.

Or so it seems to me whenever I have to deal with them. We ended up with Microsoft defender on our corp Macs even.. :|

Its absolutely possible. Weve also had them unaware of github, and had them label Amazon S3 as a risk since it specifically wasn't Microsoft.

There is no bottom to the barrel, and incompetence and insensitivity can rise quite high in some cases.

I work at a cool place now that is well aware of it, but in 2023 I worked at a very large insurance company with over a thousand people in IT. Some of the gatekeepers were not aware of docker. Luckily another team had set up Openshift, but then the approval process for using it was a nightmare.

I have personally given up trying to get a $25 product purchased through official channels. The process can make everything painful.

Congrats, the process fulfilled it's purpose. Another small cost saved :)

Trust me, the thought crossed my mind. They definitely beat me.

It can be easier to spend £100K than £100.

I'll see your "IT team never heard of docker" and raise you "security want to ban local containers because they allow uncontrolled binaries onto corporate hardware.". But that's not something podman solves...

Every single developer is running 'uncontrolled source code' on corporate hardware every single day.

The defence isn't against malicious developers writing evil code, but some random third party container launched via a curl | bash which mounts ~/ into it and posts all your ssh keys to some server in china... Or whatever.

Or so I was told when I made the monumental mistake of trying to fight such a policy once.

So now we just have a don't ask don't tell kind of gig going on.

I don't really know what the solution is, but dev laptops are goldmines for haxxors, and locking them down stops them from really being dev machines. shrug

> some random third party container launched via a curl | bash which mounts ~/ into it and posts all your ssh keys to some server in china

it's pretty stupid because the same curl | bash that could have done that could have just posted the same contents directly to the internet without the container. The best chance you actually have is to do as much development as possible inside a sealed environment like ... a container where at least you have some way to limit visibility of partially trusted code of your file system.

And this is regarded as an existential problem which cannot be permitted to persist by some in the security space.

Yeah all of that is a huge pain and fantastic to avoid.

> An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows and automated ways to keep tabs on who has what and who needs what. They may also be under various compliance requirements that expect due diligence to happen every quarter to make sure everything is legit from a licensing perspective.

Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.

Every new software license requires legal to review it.

These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)

Then they start investigating how often people use software packages and realize most people aren't actually using most software they have seats for. This happens because when software feels 'free' people request it for one-time use for a thing or to try it out and then forget about it, so you have low utilization across the board.

So they start making it harder to add new software. They start auditing usage. They may want reports on why software is still needed and who uses it.

It all adds up. I understand you don't think it should be this way, but it is at big companies. You're right that that the $24/user per month isn't much, but it's one of dozens of fees that get added, multiplied by every employee in the company, and now they need someone to maintain licenses, get them reviewed, interact with the rep every year, do the negotiation battles, and so on. It adds up fast.

> Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.

This is going to differ company to company but since we're narrowing it to large companies I disagree. Usually there's a TPM that tracks license distribution and usage. Most companies provide that kind of information as part of their licensing program (and Docker certainly does.)

> Every new software license requires legal to review it.

Yes, but this is like 90% of what legal does - contract review. It's also what managers do but more on the negotiation end. Most average software engineers probably don't realize it but a lot of cloud services, even within a managed cloud provider like AWS, require contract and pricing negotiation.

> These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)

As I said earlier, I can't speak for other companies but at large companies I've worked at this just simply isn't true. There's metrics for when the software isn't being used because the corporation is financially incentivized to shrink those numbers or consolidate on software that achieves similar goals. They're certainly individually tracked fairly far up the chain even if they do appear as a big number somewhere.

that all is most basic bookkeeping, I cannot take the argument "$x/user × every employee adds up" serious.

Also, latest with 20 employees or computers, someone in charge of IT (sysadmin, IT department) would decide to use a software asset management tool (aka software inventory system) to automatically track, roll out, uninstall, monitor vetted software. Anything else is just unprofessional.

An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows

The business world is full of things that "should" be a certain way, but aren't.

For the technology world, double the number.

We'd all like to live in some magical imaginary HN "should" world, but none of us do. We all work in companies that are flawed, and sometimes those flaws get in the way of our work.

If you've never run into this, buy a lottery ticket.

>An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows

I'm in IT consulting. If most companies could even get the basic best practices of the field implemented, I wouldn't have a job.

Not just large companies

OT because not docker

In the realm of artistic software (thinking Alberton Live and Adobe suites) licensing hell is a real thing. In my recent experience it sorts the amateurs from the pros, in favour of amateurs

The time spent learning the closed system includes hours and dollars wrestling licenses. Pain++. Not just the unaffordable price, but time that could be spent creating

But for an aspiring professional it is the cost of entry. These tools must be mastered (if not paid for, ripping is common) as they have become a key part of the mandated tool chains, to the point of enshittification

The amateur is able to just get on with it, and produce what they want when they want with a dizzying array of possible tools

A large company has to deal with many different things, some of the things are intrinsic to the business, some are not. When push comes to shove, business will try to relieve itself of the latter so it can focus on the former.

> You end up having to track who has it installed. Hired 5 more people this week? How many of them will want docker desktop? Oh, we’ve maxed the licenses we bought? Time to re-open the procurement process and amend the purchase order.

I don't quite get this argument. How is that different from any piece of software that an employee will want in any sort of enterprise setting? From an IT operations perspective it is true that Docker Desktop on Windows is a little more annoying than something like an Adobe product, because Docker Desktop users need their local user to be part of their local docker security group on their specific machine. Aside from that I would argue that Docker Desktop is by far one of the easiest developer tools (and do note that I said developer tools) to track licenses for.

In non-enterprise setups I can see why it would be annoying but I suspect that's why it's free for companies with fewer than 250 people and 10 million in revenue.

> How is that different from any piece of software that an employee will want in any sort of enterprise setting?

Open source is different in exactly that, no procurement.

Finance makes procurement annoying so people are not motivated to go through it.

That assumes that you can, in fact, install that software in the first place. "Developers" sometimes get a bit of a pass, but I've been inside more than a few companies where... no one could install anything at all, regardless of whether there was a cost. Requesting some software would usually get someone with too much time on their hands (who would also complain about being overworked) asking what you need, why you need it, why you didn't try something else, do you really need it, etc. In some scenarios the 'free' works against, because "there's no support". I was seeing this as late as 2019 at a company - it felt like being back in 1997.

Cool. Then keep using Docker Desktop if you want to. That's not the situation most of the people in this thread are talking about though.

Around here it's usually a lot harder to get open source software approved with IT because they tend to dislike products where they can't call a compant. Licensing is easier of course, but for a lot of software licensing is virtually automatic. With Docker it's billed by the amount of people in the Docker AD group, and it tells EU tax deductable automatically.

Not that this should be an argument for docker. The idea that having someone to call makes a piece of software "safer" is as ridiculous at it sounds. Especially if you've ever tried "calling" a company you buy 20 licenses from, and when I say call what I really mean is talking with a chatbot and then waiting a month for them to get back to you via email. But IT's gonna IT.

I touched on this in my parallel reply, but to expand on it:

The usual way that procurement is handled, for the sake of everybody's sanity, is to sign a flat-rate / tiered contract, often with some kind of true-up window. That way the team that's trying to buy software licenses doesn't have their invoices swinging up/down every time headcount or usage patterns shifts, and they don't have to go back to the well every time they need more seats.

This is a reasonably well-oiled machine, but it does take fuel: setting up a new enterprise agreement like that takes humans and time, both of which are not free. So companies are incentivized to be selective in when they do it. If there's an option that requires negotiating a license deal, and an option that does not, there's decent inertia towards the latter.

All of which is a long way to say: many large enterprises are "good" at knowing how many of their endpoints are running what software, either by making getting software a paperwork process or by tracking with some kind of endpoint management (though it's noteworthy that there are also large enterprises that suck at endpoint management and have no clue what's running in their fleet). The "hard" part (where "hard" means "requires the business to expend energy they'd rather not) is getting a deal that doesn't involve the license seat counter / invoice details having to flex for each individual.

You're right that it's no different than other software, but when you reach the point where the average employee has 20-30 different licenses for all the different things they might use, managing it all becomes a job for multiple people.

Costs and management grow in an O(n*m) manner where n is employees and m is numbers of licenses per employee. It seems like nothing when you're small and people only need a couple licenses, but a few years in the aggregate bills are eye-popping and you realize the majority of people don't use most of the licenses they've requested (it really happens).

Contrast this with what it takes for an engineer to use a common, free tool: They can just use it. No approval process. No extra management steps for anyone. Nothing to argue that you need to use it every year at license audit time. Just run with it.

> Contrast this with what it takes for an engineer to use a common, free tool: They can just use it. No approval process.

As far as IT operations goes, it's usually easier to get approval for paid products since they come with support and are viewed as more "trustworthy". At least in my experience.

I've never worked in a 300+ organisation where you could "just use" things. I have worked in places where they gave some of us local admins (I've been a domainadmin in a few places too), but there is usually a large bureaucracy around software regardless of licenses. Where I work right now, licensing is a minor part of it for companies with good payment systems (like Docker) where it'll automatically go on the books and be EU tax deducted. Compare that to GitKraken where you need to create an IT owner account inside their system, and then distribute the annual licenses manually after you pay for them with a credit card that you will then need to manually submit for tax deduction.

Are you complaining about buying 5 licenses? It seems extremely easy to handle. It feels like sometimes people just want to complain.

Everything is hard in a large company and they have hired teams to manage procurement so this is just you over thinking.

What a strangely hostile reply.

How often have you dealt with large org procurement processes? I've spent weeks waiting on the one person needed to approve something that cost less than something I could readily buy on my T&E card.

Typically the team they hired is focused on you not procuring things.

I think a lot of this boils down to Procurement's good outcome generally being quite different than the good outcome for each team that wants a purchase.

To draw a parallel: imagine a large open source project with a large userbase. The users interact with the project and a bunch of them have ideas for how to make it better! So they each cut feature requests against the project. The maintainers look at them. Some of the feature requests they'll work on, some of them they'll take well-formed pull requests. But some they'll say "look, we get that this is helpful for you, but we don't think this aligns with the direction we want the project to go".

A good procurement team realizes that every time the business inks a purchase agreement with a vendor, the company's portfolio has become incrementally more costly. For massive deals, most of that cost is paid in dollars. For cheaper software, the sticker price is low but there's still the cost of having one more plate to juggle for renewals / negotiations / tracking / etc.

So they're incentivized to be polite but firm and push back on whether there's a way to get the outcome in another way.

(this isn't to suggest that all or even most procurement teams are good, but there is a kernel of sanity in the concept even though it's often painful for the person who wants to buy something)

I'm of the opinion that large companies should be paying for the software they use regardless of whether it's open source or not, because software isn't free to develop. So assuming you're paying for the software you use, you still have the problem that you are subject to your internal procurement processes. If your internal procurement processes make it really painful to add a new seat, then maybe the processes need to be reformed. Open source only "fixes" the problem insofar as there's no enforcement mechanism, so it makes it really easy for companies to stiff the open source contributors.

> so it makes it really easy for companies to stiff the open source contributors

I don't think there's any stiffing going on, since the open source contributors knowingly contributed with a license that specifically says that payment isn't required. It is not reasonable for them to take the benefits of doing that but then expect payment anyway.

"stiff the open source contributors"

I'm not sure you realize that "open source" means anyone anywhere is free to use, modify, and redistribute the software in any way they see fit? Maybe you're thinking of freeware or shareware which often _do_ come with exceptions for commercial use?

But anyway, as an open source contributor, I have never felt I was being "stiffed" just because a company uses some software that I helped write or improve. I contribute back to projects because I find them useful and want to fix the problems that I run into so I don't have to maintain my own local patches, help others avoid the same problems, and because making the software better is how I give back to the open source community.

[flagged]

....and yet those tech bros all use open source software themselves.

So, I'm of two thoughts here:

1. As parallel commenters have pointed out, no. Plenty of open source developers exist who aren't interested in getting paid for their open source projects. You can tell this because some open source projects sell support or have donation links or outright sell their open source software and some do not. This line of thinking seems to come out of some utopian theoretical world where open source developers shouldn't sell their software because that makes them sell-outs but users are expected to pay them anyways.

2. I do love the idea of large companies paying for open source software they use because it tends to set up all kinds of good incentives for the long term health of software projects. That said, paying open source projects tends to be comically difficult. Large companies are optimized for negotiating enterprise software agreements with a counterparty that is primed to engage in that process. They often don't have a smooth way to like, just feed money into a Donate form, or make a really big Github or Patreon Sponsorship, etc. So even people in large companies that really want to give money to open source devs struggle to do so.

I think I fully agree, although to expound on (1) I don't think that is the kind of software that any company should want to depend on for anything remotely important. I'm sure there are counter examples where you get a high quality project that doesn't require or accept donations, but I think these will be exceedingly few and far between. It seems like it's in the company's best interest to make sure the development for a dependency isn't going to go away for lack of funding?

This math sounds really simple until you work for a company that is “profitable” yet constantly turning over every sofa cushion for spare change. Whuch describes most publicly traded companies.

It can be quite difficult to get this kind of money for such a nominal tool that has a lot of free competition. Docker was very critical a few years ago, but “why not use podman or containerd or…” makes it harder to stand up for.

> If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license.

It doesn't quite change your argument, but where have you seen $9/year/dev?

The only way I see a $9 figure is the $9/month for Docker Pro with a yearly sub, so it's 12*$9=$108/year/dev or $1080/year for your 10 devs team.

Also it should be noted that Docker Pro is intended for individual professionals, so you don't have collaboration features on private repos and you have to manage each licence individually, which, even for only 10 licences, implies a big overhead.

If you want to work as a team you need to take the Docker Team licence, at $15/month/dev on a yearly sub, so now you are at $1800/year for your 10 devs team.

Twenty times more than your initial figure of $90/year. Still, $1800 is not that much in the grand scheme of things, but then you still have to add a usual Atlassian sub, an Office365/GWorkspace sub, an AI sub... You can end-up paying +$200/month/dev just in software licences, without counting the overhead of managing them.

I can't speak for all companies but a few I've dealt with bought licenses exclusively for Docker Desktop access. They're not using private repos since they were invested in private registries through their cloud provider.

> Was this a deal breaker for any company?

It is at the company I currently work for. We moved to Rancher Desktop or Podman (individual choice, both are Apache licensed) and blocked Docker Desktop on IT's device management software. Much easier than going through finance and trying to keep up with licenses.

Deal breaker for us too, now in my second org where that's been true.

It's not just that you need a licence now, it's that even if we took it to procurement, until it actually got done we'd be at risk of them turning up with a list of IP addresses and saying "are you going to pay for all of these installs, then?". It's just a stupid position to get into. The Docker of today might not have a record of doing that, but I wouldn't rule out them getting bought by someone like Oracle who absolutely, definitely would.

Were there any missing/worse functional capabilities that drove you over to Podman/alternatives? Or just the licensing / pricing?

No, it was entirely a business decision in both cases.

If your enterprise with a large engineering team that isn’t a software company, you are a cost center. So anything related to developer tools is rarely funded. It will mostly be - use the free stuff and suck it up.

Either that or you have a massive process to acquire said licenses with multiple reporting requirements. So, you manager doesn’t need the headache and says just use the free stuff and move on.

I used to use docker. I use podman now. Are there teams in my enterprise who have docker licenses - maybe. But tracking them down and dealing with the process of adding myself to that “list” isn’t worth the trouble.

I work for a $2 billion/yr company and we need three levels of approval for a Visio license. I've never been at a large corp where you could just order shit like that. You'll have to fill out forms , have a few meetings about it, business justification spreadsheets etc, then get told it's not in the budget.

> I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free.

It is for now, but I can't think of a player as large as Docker that hasn't pulled the rug out from under deals like this. And for good reason, that deal is probably a loss leader and if they want to continue they need to convert those free customers into paying.

The problem is not the cost. It's complexity. From a buyer perspective literally fighting with the procurement team is a nightmare.

And usually the need is coming from someone below C-level. So you have to: convince your manager and his manager convince procurement team it has to be in a budget (and usually it's much easier to convince to pay for the dinner) than you have a procurement team than you need to go through vendor review process (or at least chase execution)

This is reality in all big companies that this rule applies to. It's at least a quarter project.

Once I tried to buy a $5k/yr software license. The Sidekiq founder told me (after two months of back and forth) that he's done and I have to pay by CC (which I didn't had as miserable team lead).

> you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license

It's only 9 bucks a year, its only 5 bucks a month, its less than a dollar a day.

Docker, ide, ticking system, GitHub, jira, sales force, email, office suit, Figma.... all of a sudden your spending 1000 bucks a month per staff member for a small 10 person office.

Meanwhile AWS is charging you .01xxxx for bandwidth, disk space, cpu time, s3 buckets, databases. All so tiencent based AI clients from China hammer your hardware and run up your bill....

The rent seeking has gotten out of hand.

The loaded cost is truly something else, and most understood by people who had to find a way to pay for it all, or paid for it all for others.

The majority of businesses in the world, (and the majority of jobs) are created and delivered by small business, not big.

And then the issues when a service goes down it takes everyone else down with it.

Yep! What startup has the goal of making less than $10 million in annual revenue? That sentence was absolutely a deal breaker for the CEO and CTO of our last company.

And since when has Docker Desktop "just worked"?

I've been using Docker since before Docker Desktop.

Never really had any major problems with Docker Desktop on Windows. I run it and it allows me to run containers through WSL 2. Volume performance is near native Linux speeds and the software itself doesn't crash, even on my 10 year old machine.

I also use it on macOS on a work laptop for a lot of different projects and it works. There's more issues around volume mount performance here but it's not something that's unusably slow. Also given the volume performance is mostly due to OS level file system things I'm skeptical Podman would resolve that. I remember trying Colima for something and it made no difference there.

We only run Podman Desktop if ever because for large companies it is cost prohibitive. We also found that most people don’t need *Desktop at all. Command line works fine

I work at a fortune 250 and cost of the licence was the given reason for moving to podman for the whole org.

I don't particularly care if it's worth it or not. I don't need to do it. Getting money for things is not easy in all companies.

> Was this a deal breaker for any company?

It's not the money, it's the bureaucracy. You can't just buy software, you need a justification, a review board meeting, marketplace survey with explanations of why this particular vendor was chosen over others with similar products, sign off from the management chain, yearly re-reviews for the support contract, etc...

And then you need to work with the vendor to do whatever licensing hoops they need to do to make the software work in an offline environment that will never see the Internet, something that more often than not blows the minds of smaller vendors these days. Half the time they only think in the cloud and situations like this seem like they come from Mars.

The actual cost of the product is almost nothing compared to the cost of justifying its purchase. It can be cheaper to hire a full time engineer to maintain the open source solutions just to avoid these headaches. But then of course you get pushback from someone in management that goes "we want a support contract and a paid vendor because that's best practices". You just can't win sometimes.

Docker Desktop is also (imo) useless and helps be ignorant.

Most Mac users I see using it struggle to see the difference between "image" and "container". Complete lack of understanding.

All the same stuff can easily be done from cli.

Not everyone uses software the same way.

Not everyone becomes a beginner to using software the same way or the one way we see.

I don't believe it's possible to run Docker on macOS without Docker Desktop (at least not without something like lima.) AFAIUI, Docker Desktop contains not just the GUI, but also the hypervisor layer. Is my understanding mistaken?

It's pretty easy to run docker on macos -- colima[1] is just a brew command away...

It runs qemu under the hood if you want to run x86 (or sparc or mips!) instead of arm on a newer mac.

[1]https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/colima

> colima[1] is just a brew command away...

Which would be great if it worked reliably, or had any documentation at all for when it breaks. But it doesn't and it doesn't.

First, I guess I'll just invoke Sturgeon's law[1] -- almost all software, especially if you don't really understand it, is crap, and probably the software you understand is also crap, you're just used to it. Good software is pretty tricky to make.

But second -- I use colima lots, on my home macs and my work macs, and it mostly just works. The profiles stuff is kinda annoying and I find myself accidentally running arm when I want x86, or other tedious config issues crop up. But it actually has been easier to live with than docker desktop where I'd run out of space and things would fall apart.

Docker on MacOS is broadly going work poorly relative to it on linux, just from having to run the docker stuff in a linux vm that's hiding somewhere behind the scenes.

If you find too much friction with any of these, probably it's easier to just run a linux vm on the mac and interact with docker in the 'native' environment. I've found UTM to be quite a bit easier to live with than virtualbox.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

> almost all software, especially if you don't really understand it, is crap, and probably the software you understand is also crap, you're just used to it. Good software is pretty tricky to make.

Most software has issues, but Colima is noticeably worse than most software I've used. And the complete lack of documentation is definitely not normal.

As hair splitting, one can choose to use qemu or Virtualization.framework https://lima-vm.io/docs/config/vmtype/vz/ (I'm aware that's a link to Lima docs but ... <https://github.com/abiosoft/colima/blob/v0.8.4/config/config...>)

I cannot run docker in macos without docker desktop. I use the cli to manage images, containers, and everything else.

> Most Mac users I see using it struggle to see the difference between "image" and "container". Complete lack of understanding.

Because they just want their software package to run and they have been given some magic docker incantation that, if they are lucky, actually launches everything correctly.

The first time I used Docker I had so many damn issues getting anything to work I was put off of it for a long time. Heck even now I am having issues getting GPU pass through working, but only for certain containers, other containers it is working fine for. No idea what I am even supposed to do about that particular bit of joy in my life.

> All the same stuff can easily be done from cli.

If a piece of technology is being forced down a user's throat, users just wants it to work and go out of their way so they can get back to doing their actual job.

for reference a jp dev will be paid around $50,000. most of the world will probably be in the 10k-50k range except a few places (switzerland, luxembourg, usa?).

atlassian and google and okta and ghe and this and that (claude code?). that eventually starts to stack up.

I think you are underestimating the salaries in other "developed" countries, but you are right that US salaries are much higher than any other country (especially in Silicon Valley)

You have a valid point in that many HN commentators seem to live in a bubble where spending thousands of dollars on a developer for "convenience" is seen as a no-brainer. They often work in companies that don't make a profit, but are funded by huge VC investments. I don't blame them, as it is a valid choice given the circumstances. If you have the money, why not? But they may start thinking differently if the flow of VC money slows down.

It's similar to how some wealthy people buy a private jet. Their time is valuable, and the cost seems justified (at least if you don’t care about the environmental impact).

I believe that frugality is actually the default mode of business, but many companies in SV are protected from the consequences by the VCs.

$90 is also like 1.5 hours of work that I would've spent debugging podman anyway. And I've spent more than a few hours every time podman breaks, it to be honest.

Even large companies with thousands of developers have budgets to manage and often times when the CT/IO sees free as an option that's all that matters.

I've seen a weird thing on their service agreement:

Use Restrictions. Customer and its Users may not and may not allow any third party to: [...] 10. Access the Service for the purpose of developing or operating products or services intended to be offered to third parties in competition with the Services[...]

Emphasis mine on 'operating'.

So I cannot use Docker Desktop to operate, for example: ECR, GCR or Harbor?

I think the Service in question is services like Docker Hub that they don't let you use as the infrastructure for your competing site.

At my job going through procurement for something like Docker Desktop when there are free alternatives is not worth it.

It takes forever, so long that I'll forget that I asked for something. Then later when they do get around to it, they'll take up more of my time than it's worth on documentation, meetings, and other bullshit (well to me it's bullshit, I'm sure they have their reasons). Then when they are finally convinced that yes a Webstorm license is acceptable, they'll spend another inordinate amount of time trying to negotiate some deal with Jetbrains. Meanwhile I gave up 6 months ago and have been paying the $5 a month myself.

To bring up AI, and the eventual un-subsidizing of costs; if $9 a year is too much for docker... Then even the $20/mo (June) price tag is too high for AI, much less $200 (August), or $2000? (post subsidizing)

I think that I never saw somebody using Docker Desktop. I saw running containers with the command line everywhere, but I maybe I did not notice. No licenses for the command line tools, right?

On a Mac or Windows machine, you generally need something to get you a Linux environment on which to run the containers.

You can run your own VM via any number of tools, or you can use WSL now on Windows, etc etc. But Docker Desktop was one of the first push-button ways to say "I have a Mac and I want to run Docker containers and I don't want to have to moonlight as a VM gardener to do it.

The command-line tools on a Mac usually come from Docker Desktop. The homebrew version of docker is bare-bones and requires the virtualbox-based docker-machine package, whereas Desktop is using Apple's Virtualization Framework. Nobody runs the homebrew version as far as I can tell.

On Windows, you can use the docker that's built in to the default WSL2 image (ubuntu), and Docker Desktop will use it if available, otherwise it uses its own backend (probably also Hyper-V based).

I use Orbstack myself, but that's also a paid product.

I sometimes use Docker Desktop on my Mac to view logs. It's more convenient.

It's a deal breaker because it was previously free to use, and frankly it's not worth $1 a month given there are better paid alternatives, let alone better free alternatives.

You need a compliance department and attorneys to look over licenses and agreements. It's a real hassle and not really related to cost of the license itself.

Yes. I worked for a company with a few thousand developers and we swapped away from Docker one week with almost no warning. It was a memorable experience.

Reading through the comments here, it looks like there is an opportunity for a startup to streamline software licensing. Just a free tip.

There are already software licensing providers such as 10Duke that do exactly that. Pretty much all of the licensing related problems mentioned here would either disappear or at the very least get dramatically simpler if more companies used 10Duke Enterprise as their licensing solution to issue and manage licenses. There is a better way, but sadly most businesses overlook licensing.

(the company I work for uses them, our licensing used to be a mess similar to what's described here)

Yeah, at a big enterprise the larger challenge ahead of even payment is the legal arrangements. They typically sign some "master license" agreement with an aggregator like CDW. Those places don't seem well set up for software redistribution though. Setting up a Steam or AppStore clone for various utility-ware would go a long way to enabling people to access the software an enterprise doesn't mind paying for if the legal and financial stuff wasn't applying friction.

> you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license

Correction: Docker Desktop is $9/month (not $9/year).

I hated the docker desktop telemetry. I remember it happened in the macos installer even before you got any dialog box

It's not the cost, it's the headache. Do I need to worry about setting up SSO, do I need to work with procurement, do I need to do something in our SOC2 audit, do I need to get it approved as an allowed tool, etc.

Whether it's $100/year or $10k/year it's all the same headache. Yes, this is dumb, but it's how the process works at a lot of companies.

Whereas if it's a free tool that just magically goes away. Yes, this is also dumb.

Docker has persuaded several big shops to purchase site licenses.

Yes. Our company no longer allows use of Docker Desktop

You are off by a factor of 12.

It's $9 per month not year.

Thanks, I can't believe I missed that!

$90 vs $1,080 would be the difference anually.

You can always negotiate the price

In other words: you can always make the buying process more complex and expensive.

For some products that might be worth it. For other not.

But whatever the outcome: you still got to track license compliance afterwards and renew licenses. (Which also works better when tracking internal usage as you know your need)

"officially supported" is not a value.

It's not the price, it's that there is one. 1 penny would be too much because it prevents compose-ability of dev workstations.

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