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We Need to Talk About Docker Hub

(www.linuxserver.io)
128 points darthShadow | 3 comments | 24 Jan 25 11:40 UTC | HN request time: 1.368s | source
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concerndc1tizen ◴[24 Jan 25 12:20 UTC] No.42812414[source]▶
If you don't like it, then why don't you use a different provider?

If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?

Storage, compute, and traffic, isn't free. You've been the beneficiary of charity for years.

Yes, the open source community has relied on this implicit charity as a parasite, by exploiting whatever free services they could. And now we're paying the price, as you say, by having DockerHub as the default provider.

My suggestion is therefore that we need independent solutions, that are fully funded as a charity, and stop relying on freemium services from corporations that fundamentally don't care about the public good.

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sealeck ◴[24 Jan 25 12:23 UTC] No.42812438[source]▶
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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TZubiri ◴[24 Jan 25 12:39 UTC] No.42812534[source]▶
"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.

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saagarjha ◴[24 Jan 25 12:43 UTC] No.42812564[source]▶
I mean, paying for your software dependencies doesn’t automatically make things any better.
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TZubiri ◴[24 Jan 25 12:55 UTC] No.42812635[source]▶
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.

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Joker_vD ◴[24 Jan 25 13:12 UTC] No.42812718[source]▶
There is difference between paying for software and paying for the development of software, you know.
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TZubiri ◴[24 Jan 25 13:17 UTC] No.42812754[source]▶
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.
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1. Joker_vD ◴[24 Jan 25 13:28 UTC] No.42812819[source]▶
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.
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2. TZubiri ◴[24 Jan 25 13:46 UTC] No.42812950[source]▶
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.

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3. Joker_vD ◴[24 Jan 25 15:57 UTC] No.42814355[source]▶
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.