We Need to Talk About Docker Hub

I'm absolutely stunned by all the negative comments in here bashing the Linuxserver project. "Run your own registry", "you get everything for free be grateful", and so on. What the hell is wrong with you?

They are a couple of guys trying to make software more accessible to thousands of people. Indeed it's a large project and one may question if they should get _everything_ for free. But that's not the point of this article. The article is about the absolutely horrendous behaviour of the company running Docker Hub. And I totally relate to this as I applied for a project of mine, too. How they run their open source program, it feels nothing more like presenting themselves as the big open source supporters, but in fact they make it extra hard for those who already maintain software for free.

"absolutely horrendous behaviour"

If the phrase absolutely horrendous behaviour maps to this triviality instead of actual atrocities, you have gotten too deep and lost context.

I don't want to discredit any small issues by putting them into global perspectives, but there's several wars as we speak, maybe just tone down your alarm levels if you want to be taken seriously.

> the absolutely horrendous behaviour

They've ignored their application. That hardly qualifies as "horrendous".

Don't you believe in freedom?

It's fair to criticize them for monopolistic practices and creating a closed ecosystem. But if you want social goods (enforced through social norms), then the company should be publicly owned, not private.

Dude, your posts are filled with wild non-sequiturs. “Don’t you believe in freedom?” What?

Dude,

I'd argue that the people in these comments are suffering from cognitive dissonance.

I see people presenting two beliefs:

1) enterprises should be free to offer the services they want, to who they want

2) consumers have the right to bully enterprises that don't offer what they want

And that's fine. People can have different politics.

But IIUC, these two beliefs are mutually exclusive.

Dictionary for the illiterate:

- Bully: when you use peer pressure, through public exposure, to induce negative consequences, as a political strategy, for furthering an agenda, and getting the victim to align with your interests.

Eh, ignoring a project isn't "absolutely horrendous", it's a little dickish at worst. They're free to accept or ignore any charity, and they're free to ignore requests for renewal. I don't know why they're not communicating (maybe they're trying to have less details publicly available for the inevitable post this would generate?) or why they'd be dropping this project entirely, but it's not like they're sending them cease & desist letters.

Many containers hosted by this project have the sole purpose of pirating media, so maybe it's not even Docker's choice to ignore the project. If they're being sued for providing piracy tools (and are smart enough to shut up about it until the lawyers clear them) it'd be stupid to explain what's going on and why. Last thing they'd need is for the copyright lawyers to make it seem like Docker is directly in kahoots with the piracy ecosystem. I'm not condemning piracy tools here, but everyone knows what you should expect if you're hosting piracy adjacent services.

It was pretty cool of them to offer DSOS to open source projects but I guess that's coming to an end if they don't even bother replying to their form anymore. But it's not like Docker is known to the public for giving other projects free hosting, the only reliable free hosting Docker provides are the containers they put under their own name spaces. It sucks people fall for the openwashing these large technology companies do, but I think people have unusually high expectations of Docker here.

Fair point. I only know Linuxserver from various open source projects that don't offer containers on their own. I guess you mean tools like Radarr and so on. I guess it's okay to assume that someone might by offended by that.

What I specifically meant by horrendous was not only that they ignore one project. Unfortunately, I made similar experiences with my little project. They don't reply to emails, the application process is mediocre at best and the last time my projects' org got a renewal for the program, they mixed up accounts and first wanted to charge me for a team plan. Thank god someone noticed this on their side and fixed it. But all in all, a subpar experience. My expectation would be that someone at Docker takes care of this in an honest and professional manner. As of today, this seems to be not the case.

Nah, you’ve got a bad take. I don’t know why but you strike me as very anti-consumer.

Maybe horrendous is the wrong word, but having a corporation like Docker accepting applications for an open-source program, and then ghosting those applicants, isn’t acceptable or professional.