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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

After their last rug pull when they started charging projects for registry after parading it as a fully free service for almost a decade, it has become hard to trust anything free.

Bait and switch once the adoption happens has become way too common in the industry.

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Docker is a company I just can’t hate on. They’ve completely transformed how software is deployed. Containers gained so much momentum it kind of outgrew them and they lost a lot of potential business. I would hardly call beginning to charge after a decade of free service a rug pull, especially now that dependence on Docker’s registry is shrinking all the time.

I don't hate them. But I don't want to depend on them for any product I manage.

Have you checked out Dagger?

It's what the people who created OG Docker are building now

Dagger is one of those things I want to like, but find incredibly painful to use in practice.

I have tried it but wasn't a fan. I tried to convert one of our Actions workflows and that proved to be a PITA that I gave up on. It seems now the project is pivoting into AI stuff.

Well, one of them.

Given the wealth and productivity creation that they're responsible for enabling across the industry, they deserve to be paid for it. There is no way for them to have achieved this with zero friction.

I totally support companies charging for things which cost money to make but I think the strategy of saying something is free and later reneging is a very risky strategy. You’ll get some license sales after cold-calling people’s bosses or breaking builds but they won’t thank you for it.

It's the only rational way for a company to behave. Nonetheless you said it was free for 10 years. Many entire companies started and died within 10 years and had the benefit of the free registry the entire time. If you avoid doing something because it might change 10 years later, you'll never get anything done.

Feels like they're trying to put the cat back in the bag and recoup a fraction of the exodus from the registry thing.

Projects are not charged for hub usage

When was this?

https://www.docker.com/developers/free-team-faq/

> Is Docker sunsetting the Free Team plan?

> No. Docker communicated its intent to sunset the Docker Free Team plan on March 14, 2023, but this decision was reversed on March 24, 2023.

For oss projects with heavy pulls, the (free) dsos programme removes all rate limits on their public images, the intention was never to impact projects, but rather mega corporations using hub as free hosting:

https://www.docker.com/community/open-source/application/

> 100 pulls per 6 hours for unauthenticated users and 200 pulls per 6 hours for Docker Personal users

Not a problem for casual users but even a small team like mine, a dozen people with around a dozen public images, can hit the pull limit deploying a dozen landscapes a day. We just cache all the public images ourselves and avoid it.

https://www.docker.com/blog/revisiting-docker-hub-policies-p...

It becomes a problem if you're testing something in local Kubernetes clusters that are ephemeral

That's for unauthenticated users. Just log in?

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