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> 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.

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”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

'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.

Apparently they work in the past...

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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